EnterprenuerEric Rivas did not set out to become the person companies call when their reputation is on fire. He started at a shaved ice stand at fourteen. He answered phones at a call center. He sorted returns in a warehouse. From the very beginning, what he had was an obsession with how things work, how people find information, and how that information shapes the way the world sees you. That obsession became a career in digital marketing. The career became Respect Network, a Richmond, Kentucky-based firm specializing in online reputation management, negative content removal, and search result suppression.
As CEO, Eric now leads a team that operates at the intersection of SEO, legal strategy, and platform policy, fighting for clients whose digital records no longer reflect who they actually are. He holds an MBA and a BS in Marketing from Utah Valley University, is fluent in English and Spanish, and has spent nearly a decade building expertise across agencies, corporate teams, startups, and nonprofits before channeling all of it into a focused mission: ensuring the internet tells your story accurately. We sat down with Eric to talk about reputation, resilience, and what it really means to start over online.
What is the story of Respect Network?
It came from watching people get hurt by something they couldn’t control.
I spent years working in marketing across agencies, corporate teams, and nonprofits, and I kept seeing the same pattern. Someone would have a bad review sitting on the first page of Google. Or a news article from five years ago that had nothing to do with who they were anymore. And it was just… there. Costing them clients, costing them opportunities, costing them peace of mind.
The internet has a long memory and very little mercy. Respect Network is my answer to that.We go in and figure out what’s there, why it’s ranking, and what combination of legal, technical, and content strategy gives our client the best shot at pushing it down or getting it removed entirely. It’s not a magic trick. It’s methodical, it takes time, and it works. But only if you understand both the search side and the legal side. That’s what we’ve built.
How do you stay productive?
My mornings are mine. That’s the rule I never break.
Before I open email, before I look at anything work-related, I spend the first hour reading. Not scrolling. Reading. It sounds small but it completely changes how I think for the rest of the day.
After that, I pick three things that have to happen before the day ends. Not a list of twenty. Three. That filter has probably saved me from more bad decisions than any framework I learned in my MBA.
On the team side, I keep meetings tight and purposeful. If it can be handled in a Slack message or an email, it stays there. The time you protect for real thinking is the time that actually moves the business forward.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I studied law and finance abroad in Florence, and one thing that experience gave me was comfort with uncertainty. You’re in a new country, you don’t know all the rules, and you have to figure things out as you go. That’s not so different from building a business.
When I have an idea, I don’t wait for it to be perfect. I ask: is this actually solving a problem for someone, or is it just interesting to me? Those are two very different things.
If it’s solving a real problem, I move. I sketch the workflow, figure out who needs to be involved, and start before I’ve answered every question. The answers usually come in the doing.
At Respect Network, most of our best service refinements came from client situations that didn’t fit our existing playbook. We adapted, documented what worked, and built it into the process.
What’s your favorite trend?
Platform accountability is the one I watch most closely, and it’s genuinely changing what’s possible in our space.
For a long time, harmful content online operated in a gray zone where platforms didn’t want to be responsible for it, and individuals had almost no legal leverage to get it removed. That’s shifting. Courts are increasingly willing to issue removal orders. Platforms are getting more responsive to documented harm. And Google’s own E-E-A-T framework is changing how authoritative, accurate content competes against low-quality attack pages.
All of that is good for our clients. The window for accountability is opening, and we know exactly how to step through it.
What habits make you productive?
I stopped pretending I could do everything and started getting honest about where my time actually belongs.
The thing nobody tells you about productivity is that most of it is subtraction, not addition. Stop the meetings that go nowhere. Stop the apps that fragment your attention. Stop saying yes to things that aren’t your job to do. What’s left is usually enough.
I’m also a consistent reader, specifically across disciplines. I’ll go from a book on SEO to something on behavioral economics to something on litigation strategy. That habit is where a lot of my best ideas come from. Fields that look unrelated usually aren’t.
What’s your advice for the Noob?
Take the job that teaches you something, not the one that sounds best on paper.
I started at Zija as a call center rep. That’s not a glamorous entry point. But it meant I was inside a company, watching how things moved, building relationships, proving I could do more. When the internship opened in marketing, I was already there. When the SEO role opened, I was already known.
The people I’ve seen struggle the most are the ones waiting for the perfect opportunity. They’re so focused on avoiding a bad start that they never start. Every role I’ve had, even the ones that felt like a step sideways, ended up being essential to the next thing.
Get in. Work hard. Pay attention to everything.
What is one thing we can all agree on?
Your reputation is doing work for you whether you’re managing it or not.
Most people think of online reputation as something that only matters when things go wrong. But it’s active all the time. Every time someone Googles your name before a meeting. Every time a potential client checks your company before signing. Every time a journalist or investor runs a quick search.
The question isn’t whether your digital presence is influencing people. It is. The question is whether it’s saying what you want it to say.
What do you recommend as an entrepreneur?
Know what you’re actually selling.
This sounds obvious and it’s not. When I was building Roots Marketing, I used to say we did “digital marketing for small businesses.” That’s not a value proposition, that’s a category. Nobody hires a category. They hire someone who understands their specific problem and has a clear answer to it.
It took me a while to get specific enough to be useful. Now with Respect Network, I can say exactly what we do, who we do it for, and what they can expect. That clarity is what builds trust before the first call even happens.
What’s your rich strategy?
Show up consistently, especially when it’s not exciting.
There’s a version of entrepreneurship that looks like big moments and dramatic breakthroughs. That version is mostly a highlight reel. The real version is doing the unglamorous thing well, repeatedly, for longer than feels comfortable.
In reputation management, there are no overnight fixes. We set that expectation with every client from day one. The strategies we build work, but they work over months, not days. Consistency is the whole game. On our end and on theirs.
How do you overcome Failure?
I had to unlearn the word before I could use it properly.
For most of my career, I didn’t think of things as failures. I thought of them as detours. That framing protected my ego but it also kept me from being fully honest about what went wrong and why.
Now I try to call things what they are. A campaign that didn’t perform is a failure. A client we couldn’t retain is a failure. And owning that, as uncomfortable as it is, is what actually drives improvement.
The shift came when I realized that accountability and self-criticism are not the same thing. You can own what didn’t work without beating yourself up over it. One makes you better. The other just makes you smaller.
Can you share a business idea?
Reputation monitoring as a standard business service, not a crisis product.
Right now, most companies don’t think about their online presence until something goes wrong. By then they’re in damage control, which is expensive and stressful and never as clean as getting ahead of it would have been.
A monthly audit of your search results, your reviews, your name associations across the web, that’s not a complicated thing to set up. But it gives you visibility. And visibility gives you time to respond before a problem becomes a crisis.
We talk to clients about this constantly. The ones who listen early spend a fraction of what the ones who call us in an emergency end up spending.
What’s your recent best buy?
Standing desk.
I resisted it for years because it felt like a lifestyle purchase pretending to be a productivity tool. I was wrong. The difference in how I feel at the end of a long day, and how clearly I think through the afternoon, is real enough that I wish I’d done it sooner.
Sometimes the boring answers are the right ones.
What are your favorite Software or Apps?
Ahrefs is essential. It’s how we understand the search landscape around a client before we build any strategy. Google Search Console for the same reason, just from the inside looking out.
For operations, Notion. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to a second brain for running a growing team. For someone who thinks in systems, it’s changed how I organize everything.
Which book would you recommend?
Influence by Robert Cialdini.
I’ve recommended it to every person I’ve hired and every client who wants to understand why their reputation matters as much as it does. Cialdini breaks down the psychology of trust, how it’s built, how it’s lost, and how perception shapes decisions in ways people aren’t even conscious of.
If you work in marketing, it’s required reading. If you work in reputation management, it’s the foundation.
What’s your favorite quote?
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
Henry Ford said it and I’ve never found a reason to disagree. The ceiling in most situations is the one you set for yourself. That’s uncomfortable to hear and liberating once you actually believe it.
TL;DR: What could Eric Rivas offer to Enterprenuer readers?
Your online reputation is not a reflection of your past. It’s infrastructure for your future. Treat it that way.
The tools exist. The legal pathways exist. The strategies exist. What most people are missing is the discipline to manage their digital presence before it becomes a problem, and the right team to call when it already has.
Eric Rivas built Respect Network on the belief that accurate representation online is not a luxury. It’s a right. And for the clients who work with his team, it’s becoming a reality, one search result at a time.
Connect with Respect Network
Website: Respectnetwork.com
Phone: +1 (859) 667-1073
Email: [email protected]
Address: 2212 N 2nd St, STE 100, Richmond, KY 40475, USA
