How to build a successful powerhouse agency from zero in 3 years

hello no code conf my name is joe krug i'm the ceo and founder of fin suite today i'm going to talk to you about how we built a successful powerhouse agency from xero in three years this is the story of year one two and three of finn sweets agency growth we are six years old but this talk focuses on those early first three years i'll tell you how i went from a zero web knowledge salesperson to a webflow pro and we'll look at the strategies that finnsuite took as a company to become a top web flow agency what is finsuite we are a webflow exclusive web agency we do not work with any other platforms we position ourselves as experts of web flow and specifically in development we do not design for clients we're a 45 person team development focused all webflow and we also make products tools resources and content for the webflow community we are huge community advocates all of the tools and resources that we release are free we are all about community growth and this talk is more about the ongoing growth strategies that we've had we've followed these strategies in year one we follow these strategies today in year six and i believe these strategies can take any agency to that next level i'm going to go through the strategy slides and throughout the speech i'll continue to reference these slides as a reminder at the very end of the speech i'll tell you how we continue using these strategies today okay let's do it first have a plan and be ready to change it don't care about the money when you start focus on getting bigger better projects work with people who are better than you make a badass website for your company and last grow your team with motivated self-starters these are the core strategy talking points of this speech let's get into my background i'm a salesperson i was never meant to be a developer i've been selling things since as long as i can remember i've always identified myself as a salesperson even at a young young age i was an ebay powerseller in high school i was obsessed with selling anything i could find on ebay thousands of items sold i ran a successful sales team for a tech company as you can see not made for a developer i was never imagining myself as a developer but i'm here not supposed to be in the no code movement but i am here and i absolutely did have a plan for finn suite and it was always meant to be temporary i was going to make websites as i figured out what i really wanted to do this was more of a nights weekends side job part-time type business and i really saw it as a hobby that i could be paid for that's all it was i used wordpress templates i knew nothing about html nothing about css nothing about javascript but i was pretty good at assembling a wordpress template with some plugins and using wordpress i didn't have any urge to learn how the web works i was happy with this sort of drag-and-drop wordpress template builder but thank goodness i don't do that anymore and i am completely migrated over to webflow because have a plan and be ready to change it that's exactly what i did i changed this plan doesn't matter how mature your agency is plans change and i believe flexibility is incredibly important in that early business growth so here's why my plan changed first i found out i was pretty good at making websites i felt inside that i was good enough to do this thing full time and second i found webflow i was ready to go 100 percent into webflow and i was ready to change my brand new business model that i just made months ago to go and learn the web because i believe that webflow equals web education using webflow is a great way to understand how the web works and this learning that i experienced was so profound that the decision to move to webflow was instant it was an instant company pivot since day one all because of what i learned i learned more in one week of using webflow than six months of using wordpress and this deeper understanding was so so motivating but there's a problem it's difficult to get clients new platform no portfolio new profession i'm not only new to the website industry i'm new to webflow as a platform so it's very challenging to convince leads to use webflow without examples of clients that use webflow so this is where you have to not care about the money don't care about the money when you start if you're starting something brand new not focusing on the money allows you to focus on practice and learning i knew that i needed to use webflow a lot a lot a lot a lot to be a pro in webflow i needed projects to work on so i remade all of my clients websites in webflow for the clients i work with over the past six months i just went through each of their builds in wordpress rebuilt it in webflow didn't ask for money didn't expect payment the goal was to learn that's it and i even lost some money covering the higher hosting charges in web flow but that's totally okay because now i have five clients on web flow so that past issue of not having clients is now much easier because i have five clients their site is hosted on webflow and they love it but this wasn't enough five is certainly not enough websites i wanted more and more and more sites to build i made websites for free i built low-cost websites i practiced building templates i begged people to let me make a website for them and if someone gave me that opportunity i took it i was ready to do webflow for anything and i also came up with a unique sales strategy to help bring in more business very good for conversion zero percent up front 100 on delivery the mentality is do great work then get paid and if you don't like the work that i did don't pay me i actually said that to leeds and it worked really really well made sales easier it was a key strategy for this early growth anytime i found a project that i really wanted i would offer this zero 100. it gave the lead a lot of respect for fin suite a lot of trust was exchanged in that sales process and it it led to rapid portfolio growth the zero 100 creates very low risk for those leads coming in and it's hard to say no to that offer so a lot of people said yes and this helped us scale and the amount of active projects increased and that means the amount of people working on the projects increased so our don't care about the money strategy with the zero 100 really set us up for this next one focus on bigger better projects when i think of an agency growing i think of bigger budgets larger projects more projects more well-known clients and getting one of these bigger projects can completely change an agency one big project can set you up for many more projects just like that so to grow fast i focused on consistently bigger and better not one big project as many big projects as possible i was obsessed with improving the portfolio every few months i wanted to look back on the portfolio and say wow finn suite is at that next level now that was the goal every few months and there was one big client that did help transform fin suite this was the project that took us from local business websites to tech websites huge transformation it was the project that helped us get to the next level and that client was hello sign this was my go-to project i was obsessed and i used the word obsessed here because that's what it actually was i was highly focused on this project specifically i saw the job posting and i knew i needed it i was development only fancy san francisco tech company so i went a hundred thousand percent into getting this sale and i got it i put all my effort into it i spent hours of my time crafting emails i recorded videos for them to show them what i would do all before i got the job and i gave up all of my negotiating power the zero 100 to the next level i told them i didn't care what the pay was they could choose the price and the answer was yes i gave up every piece of negotiating power and they were so impressed by these gestures the work the payment and this was the project that gave us that big boost sales were easier i'm glad i did everything this this was really the project that we needed and it was all possible because i did not care about the money when i started i only cared about getting this project and i probably missed out on a good amount of money at the time but this was the best decision i could have ever made this project gave finn suite a huge boost in credibility not just portfolio credibility i learned pro level webflow skills while working on the project i work with an experienced san francisco based marketing team awesome this set me up for working with more teams like this it was just the ideal opportunity for me at the time it was so so perfect and this was the project on our portfolio that really started to attract the bigger better clients it raised our standard at thin suite and leeds started to ask me i want a website website like hello signs this was something i heard all the time so i realized if i want to focus on getting these bigger better projects and deliver at the same level of hello sign i needed more specialized skills more full service skills i needed to work with people so i need to work with people who are better than me work with people who are better than you this is a way to make your company better and for me this was hiring a designer when i hired a designer everything changed because i'm not good at design anymore i am no longer a designer because now there was a big fancy sas project in our portfolio and my design skills aren't up to the new fin suite quality i can design for local business or small companies that don't care about design but now that our portfolio is approaching that next level i am not ready for that i can't do that that's not me and i'm 100 okay with this i understand this about myself i'm just not a designer so if i continued to design we would continue to attract these subpar design projects so now working with somebody better than me that means we have better design this was a great move because now i can focus on productivity on development on project management these were my only requirements for my day to day and he designed i project managed and developed this helped me become better at webflow this made me spend most of every day developing websites in webflow countless hours of training pro designs i loved it it was a total transformation for fin suite and remember better designer is better portfolio since i am working with somebody who is better than me by default the portfolio will eventually get better the new designs made us shine our new designer transformed this portfolio and within months it was transformed from local business websites to tech and sas and within the year we were attracting a completely different type of business these businesses had more interest in their website they had more money to invest they were more appreciative these were the types of businesses we wanted to work with and now that we have this beautiful portfolio that's helping us get these bigger and better projects we need a beautiful website to show off this portfolio and that's why our next point is make a badass website for your company badass website has different meanings for different companies be aware of that i knew that our designer developer webflow community would think of a badass website as something visually fantastic something that breaks the limits of webflow that's exactly what we did remember we're now working with people who are better than me this is this is great because it gives us this real potential to now create this badass website i'm not able to do this myself so my instruction make the best website that you've never seen before this was the mentality we wanted to create something that was truly unique never seen before we wanted to make the most visually appealing website possible inside webflow and i gave our new designer this task of creating something wild and colorful and nothing specific just go go creative do do the the most creative thing that you could possibly think of i had the vision for our own website to be the best website in our portfolio i wanted our website to be a true testament to what we were able to do as a team it should set an example of what's possible in webflow and know that this costs a lot of money for us at the time time resources the new team it was a big investment and at the time this was our biggest company expense but result absolutely worth it it was a huge success the leads loved it loved it loved it loved it so excited we had leads that actually came to us and told us they were sold before the first sales call people really connected to the site and they wanted to work with finsweep and because of that it returned our investment to build it within months we had increased business so much that the investment to build the site was paid off in months and the webflow community loved it this one was unexpected the webflow community loved it this was not the intention at all but it was a beautiful unexpected result the new website attracted talent to the agency talented people want to work for an agency that looks talented so showing talent was one of our goals it was a goal for our leads to see it but not necessarily for the community so this turned into a talent magnet for us that we are attracting people to want to work for fin suite and this talent magnet gave us the opportunity to grow your team with motivated self-starters we grew the fin suite team with people who are self-starters but first before we get into self-starters let's talk about the people who i do not work well with these are not self-starters these are people who made it very difficult to grow people who always needed directions i found this out very early when people need directions this took up a lot of my time i had to spend time giving them directions and this gives me more time to do my own work and ultimately grow the business so i came to this realization that i needed people that were willing to work on their own not only act on directions and that brings us to the people i do work well with people that we were bringing in early in fin suite people that we bring in today at fin suite and those are self-starters i'm defining a self-starter as a person that manages their own work creates their own initiatives and stays active in work without being told what to do beautiful love it if a person is left with no direction this person is going to do something they'll just start to do something they'll figure out what's valuable to do for themselves or for the company and just go do it and it's important for us to bring in that type of person it's how we were able to scale the amount of active projects at finn suite without dedicated project management without a project management team no project managers and interesting fact we never use project managers at finn suite we just brought our first one in last month in year six that's how powerful these self-starters are when people can manage themselves there's a lot more efficiency less people need it in the process and since less people are needed less people are paid the employee gets paid better fin suite has a higher margin and everybody wins here so bringing these people especially early was super super key and as more leads came in there was more scaling as these other strategies we're talking about we're working to bring in leads we needed to fill people in to go and work on these projects and these self-starters were the ones to do it sell starter is able to bring a webflow project from step one just look at the specs and take that to finish so a true start to finish designer or developer or somebody working on this project and for faster scaling we agree to project to project payment for an unfunded agency growing a team of fixed salary employees is challenging very challenging so i believe it's much easier to agree to project to project terms especially when the company is young and you don't have that funded money many people in the web industry are comfortable with this this project to project payment so it's very natural for us when the project is done everyone gets paid everybody's happy they don't get the luxury of that paycheck at the end of the month but they did get a favorable payout in the completed project and when there was a happy client so it really pushed us to complete those projects keep those clients happy because that's when everybody got paid and as new projects came in as revenue increased our employee expenses followed at the same speed it's really a win-win win this project to project significantly lowered our risks fixed costs much lower tiny for a very long period of time and it's it's a really great way to grow when you just don't have the money to grow so that's how we grew our team with motivated self-starters and remember these strategies that we're talking about here are not just for year one two and three we still actively focus on all of these strategies we use these strategies in a different context but they're ongoing we absolutely follow them these concepts are relevant when we're a baby they're relevant today and i know they will be relevant in five years from now so let's close out this talk with the strategy slides and i'll go through examples of how we still follow these today so first one have a plan and be ready to change it i made my early change in the business but we are always changing plans at fin suite last year we made the decision to go development only huge change this year we've completely redefined our products and tools model this is also a huge change from where we were just a year and two ago whenever we do something new at finn sweet we create a plan for it and then we are ready to change it if needed next don't care about the money when you start we absolutely still do this not as much on the agency side like we did in the first few years but definitely on the products and community side we've been giving away products tools content all for free for the past three years and this is part and a start to our long-term product rollout think of our webflow resources and community initiatives as a beta to our paid product initiatives we didn't care about the money when we started this we still don't care about the money because we're still new at products we have a lot to learn we're not ready yet to make money from it we're still learning we've created a lot of value for you soon we'll be asking you to pay for it but now it's about practice and learning next focus on bigger better projects we are always looking for bigger clients of course anytime we see a big name come in through the lead list we light up with excitement we want to get to a level where we're working with the best brands in the world on webflow we're always focusing on getting that bigger bigger better client always always always clients projects always bigger better next work with people who are better than you this is absolutely still active this has helped us so much in the past few years improving in different areas of finn suite not just agency in product in tools and content community and it's also rewarding to see people on the team improve their skill and make themselves better while at fin suite there was a long period of time where i was the best web flow developer at finsweep now i may not even make it in the top 10. so we've seen people come to finn suite at one level transformed themselves to a pro and now they're better than me that's amazing this strategy doesn't only apply to new hires it can absolutely apply to people on your team that can get better internally make a badass website for your company of course we love this our talk this talk covered v1 website but now in this screenshot you'll see the v2 website this is our current website we're working on v3 right now v3 is going to blow your mind it is something you've never seen before in webflow i promise you this and it's going to open new opportunities for us it's going to redefine our brand our vision our skill level we still have this same mentality of make a badass website for your company and last we have grow your team with motivated self-starters this is crucial with every hire it doesn't matter how old your company is we push to get better at identifying these people and bringing them into the team always and that's it i'm done with the speech thank you so much for watching uh it's really an honor to be here talking about finn suite uh i love web flow we all love web flow and really to be part of no code conference is a true honor have a great day enjoy no code conference and thank you very much

Channel: Webflow

Views: 3,060

Keywords: How to build a successful agency, Joe Krug, Finsweet, agency growth, web design agency, grow web design agency, no code, no-code, NCC, no-code conf, no-code conference 2021, no-code conference, NCC 2021, Webflow, web design, build a website, visual development, no code revolution, low code, low code no code

Id: 0hKvf7VQMic

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021