Inside Link EP01 - Creating Processes to Grow Your Agency

awesome so it says we are live welcome guys thank you so much for being here so this is the inaugural episode of the inside link show is what I'm gonna call it and so I'll kind of well I can't really point to you guys because you don't know what arrangement you are on your screen but we'll go left and down and around to introduce ourselves so Chantel if you can go first please hi my name is Chantel dead icky and I am the chief creative officer at the Francis Torre agency in Niceville Florida perfect Elijah I'm Elijah Mills I am CEO at oxygen and you know I do some web design myself and I'm involved in IT as well to some extent and wait wait : I have I actually just recently got out of IT trying to get just focus on marketing and I've also been working on some WordPress plugins so coming more from the technical standpoint I guess I'm hoping to learn more about the processes and how to run a an effective agency here awesome well that brings us nicely into our episode title which is just creating processes to grow your agency so there's a lot of stuff here I think that is really important but I wanted to start off by saying I definitely don't want to be insensitive to the fact that obviously there are major current events going on but what I want to do is is have a spend time kind of building each other up learning from one another and then being able to take this and whenever we all inevitably come out on the other side of this be able to kind of better our businesses in that time and of course we have some downtime to kind of focus on that so real quick if I can I want to I want to just read the description for the show and then I'll jump into some questions if you guys don't mind so the the description says the show brings together freelancers and agency owners of varying sizes to discuss topics that help all of us learn grow and give back the idea is that in every episode you'll find actionable takeaways to implement in your own business to help you in all facets of your day-to-day so long-term I want it to be kind of a broad series where people might find I don't want to call like self-help their personal help but you know just topics that are both beneficial to business and personal so that's where we are I'm excited to have you guys thank you for having us cool so Wade this idea kind of sparked from you so if I can ask you kind of what what discussions you guys had in your group and then also what kind of led you to the idea of specifically you know developing processes like what in your own business has led you to this question I guess sure yeah just the other day um I had jumped on a random zoom call hosted by another face clip group and just came away really impressed with how people were helping each other and so inside my group but I went ahead and we had three or four of us join up and it was interesting to me how the conversation kind of went from the technical side of things which I started my group more around the technical aspect of working with oxygen and WordPress and even the people that I've attracted it seems like they're struggling once you get far enough into it they end up telling you that they're struggling more with the processes and this just the project management side of things um and then I hit home with me I mean that's something that has been huge with me coming like I was telling you the other day Johnson um I'm used to walking into a place of business you know just people giving me these problems I need to solve in the IT world right and yeah I you know you say yes to everything and you you fix there all their little issues that they're having and and and they you know they love you for it and and you get paid well I'm struggling seems like I was fairly comfortable in the IT world like I could I could walk in and I could fix pretty much everything that I ran into it seems like everything I touch when it comes to web design takes you know it's a bigger project more of a project than just a task right and it takes I mean five times longer than I have anticipated managing client expectations through that all is just it's a whole nother level and I'm struggling on it did something as simple as gathering content it just blows my mind you know that somebody can give me a down payment and then is it my problem that I don't understand how to gather content from them or you know I request stuff and they don't respond and just um one simple little thing I was trying to help my one of my clients the other day set up a business Facebook page and and we got locked out of his personal Facebook account through it all you know we were doing a screen share it's just like okay it seems like everywhere I turn my keep running into these little issues and do I do a niche down and say that I don't do any of this stuff you know or do it or is there a way that I can actually help these people effectively yeah yes I mean it's just you you definitely have a lot you know there's a bunch of points here to to unpack first of all there's there's one thing that I personally have experienced is not offering everything and chantal you and I have discussed that you guys have your specific Lane and you excel in that and we've talked a lot about how her and I are really complementary to one another so Chantelle you you have Hillary as your content director so do you mind speaking on how you guys sort of pull out content from people because of course you can't just start on a logo and a brand just from a blank slate you have to communicate in some capacity right definitely I mean Jonathan we've talked about like our idea clients before and our ideal clients are the ones that want to start with foundation foundational research and you go all the way back to the brand it is very difficult to begin with a touch point so if a client calls you and they're like for your example wait it's like I just want a facebook business page and we kind of backtrack that - well why and is this the right platform for your business do you have some architecture to your brand how can we help you develop that that also lends itself very well and to some discovery research for us and that is where we find the content or the content potential really so we oftentimes will get those same tasks or the same ask where oh I just want a logo if someone just wants a logo they probably are not a fit for us and I you have I believe and we really have had to get comfortable with saying no because at the end of the day if someone just wants you know if a company or a business or a startup just once a touch point we're probably not the right service provider for them I pick up on that comfortable saying no player that's I mean that's extremely challenging I think for businesses of any size without like I would say my own internal processes to look do they fit in my box and if not then I I don't take them on but the thing about that is one thing I will say is for me personally you guys probably are all in the same boat like there was a time where I simply just couldn't say no like it was a matter of either paying the rent you know buying groceries or like you know getting evicted so obviously you know what we all choose but I think as you kind of develop more more projects eventually not only do you figure out what you want to do but also what you're good at and then it makes sense to say no like all three of us Alijah way to myself come from an IT background and you know that Chantal and it's extremely hard to say no to that stuff it's like well I know I can fix it I know I can figure it out oh man yeah but the reality is whereas your time best spent right well in saying no is a very powerful thing to it was one of the I think the most unexpected rewards of really leaving the corporate world and start in launching Frances ROI was I got to stay sane Oh for the first time in a long time that just projects that honestly didn't align either with my value system or and we have a very structured value system at the agency and that provides us a lot of initial just checks and balances is where we are okay this company may not be a good match for us because they just don't ally with our value system it'd be very difficult for us to produce high quality work for them so the firt I remember the first time I even said no and it was someone just transparently that I knew I didn't want to work with because in a and when in my previous job I had to work with them and so when I left and started the agency they like were on me right away about wanting oh you know help us with this event and I'm like I don't one of them work with this person yeah in a capacity that I was before I never had the opportunity to say no to that for the first time being able to be like no this is just not a good fit it was really kind of powerful it is it is awesome definitely so one one question I have with the idea of developing processes is what do each of you maybe Elisha if you want to chime in on this what sort of non-billable things do you find yourself spending the most time on outside of your core like services so you know if you're talking about website design is there elements to that like we talked about pulling content out of people that is yeah time sink for you right so contents always the the big problem right because especially when you're building what I would call budget sites because I'm in a smaller community so most people don't have a huge budget for web sites and part of that is that they don't see the inherent value in a web site because we still have a largely offline economy in rural areas but what happens is they'll come to me and say I need a web site and I'll say okay what do you want your website to do and they'll say I want to show up on Google and that's it I mean that's all they give me right and at that point especially with the budget website they're not paying enough for me to generate content for them right then you have that back and forth of hey what do you want this to say and they don't know and it takes weeks and weeks and weeks and that that is a big problem just managing the clients in general so one thing that we've done to help that is establish a pretty rock-solid scope document at the beginning of any project that basically lets them know they're in charge of providing the content what we will and won't do and that is help with things like scope creep which I think most people that do web design know that you have to have the scope defined initially but in regards to content one thing we've done is we've put in hey you need to provide the content within this amount of time I think we gave like six months or something crazy like that but it at least puts a time limit on it to where it feels like it's important to them even though it is important they don't feel like that so by adding a deadline it helps add some weight to that I think ultimately if you can get people to pay for it you should probably generate the content for them right because it's way easier but I mean if you're building budget sites you just don't you can't you can't you'll lose money on the time that you spend I was gonna say what I I struggled with the exact same thing and like you said wait and people would just ghost you it's like they put down a thousand bucks or more as their deposit and then months go by and they disappear and so what I what I did was completely went all the way to the end and said first of all we have to have a credit card on file so that meant changing my billing system and that one that would store the card and let me charge it later on so that the second payment was due on the earlier of the website going live or usually I set it to 45 days and that gives people a really hardcore time line and it's amazing how often on like the 43rd day people like oh it looks great let's let's take it live but when I just left it open then people disappeared for months okay but you know before that the content piece I I put together this big onboarding form on my website and it's basically just gravity forms that asks everything like give me your business hours what demographics do you serve what does your ideal client look like give me your logo files what pages do you envision on the site and it's a four step form with a lot of questions but I tell people on the front end like you have to you have to fill this out otherwise the site won't be successful and that helps tremendously yeah I think we've we do the same something very similar but in a little bit of a different way so we have discovering meetings with each of our clients and phased out deliverables and you know the the the phased out deliverables are really a part of our proposal agreement and you know each deliverable is obviously contingent upon what the client provides to us but because like we're not on the technical end we are to a certain extent but we can certainly get a client only oh so far our job is really to help them develop the content knowing that they need to have that content no matter what the touch point ends up being whether it's website or social or a blog or whatever and so our job is really to develop some infrastructure there for them moving forward so we will create narrative boilerplate language tag lines like all of these things ideals services whatever they really need so that when they get to the point where they're starting to create technical touch points those things are already there because just listening to the three of you collectively and imagining having to do that they're just like okay well I want you know a website for a SARM pharmacy or something like that would be very specific yeah could you just go ahead and like throw that up for me or whatever which I'm sure you know oh I just like an easy or a simple website and you're like well that is woefully dependent on you for one frankly if you're thinking of a simple website is like one or two pages I mean I think so really setting some client expectations in the beginning having that discovery meaning phasing out deliverables and guiding them through the content process so they're hot and ready to create touch points that they need them that's yeah a great point I also to tie into that I don't do really discovery meetings I do kind of like the initial meeting sit down face-to-face and talk about the project and then one thing that I heard somebody doing which was fascinating is they have kind of a kickoff sort of in-person meeting or like a zoom call something like this but what they do is they just ask for questions to get the person talking about their business they record it and then they take it to this website called rev.com and it just transcribes everything for them and then they take that document and you know ten minutes of conversation is a lot of it's a high word count and then that helps them kind of begin the process of filtering out the website and I thought that was a pretty fascinating approach and a lot less what's the word like a lot less intimidating to somebody non-technical to have to fill out a 40 question form on a website oh yeah I mean I think there there's nothing more intimidating for a person who cannot build a simple website than to talk to someone who has a very high technical ability yeah I mean yeah you're you're basically if you if you're sitting in the consumers chair you're you're saying I don't know how to do this that's why I need you and then if those questions are too high level and they provide this wall of intimidation they're just like yeah I still just need you to do this you know I mean so it's really interesting it's not a dumbing down I think it's more of a translation yeah that's a great point because even what you mentioned there Jonathan about I've put together some of those questions in steel I think I tried out content snare it's a great tool you know what is your ideal customer and I was like I had all these visions that people were gonna fill out this pumpkin snare form you know it give me this information and then I could then I would be able to write content for them well they they should one look at that what is your ideal customer and their eyes glazed over and they were done so it's a process to get some people past that point yeah definitely it looked like you had something to say I'm not unless you were shaking your head pretty violently yeah asking a small business who their ideal customer is not a good call for us in the IT business with with my family IT shop our ideal customer is everyone right so it's and we haven't done we've we've never been in that level of doing that research and creating those consumer profiles and most small businesses are in the same boat because most small businesses are just doing what they can to keep getting working and keep paying the bills and to them that's gonna be a wasted expense because they don't see how it benefits them so you know but when you go into marketing efforts you have to know who you're looking for that's the only way you can you can target people I think I think you might just kind of hey I can relate quite well I think we must be in somewhat of the same type of area here drum I'm in a small farming community here too and yeah so it's you have a lot of great small service businesses and they're doing well and they're providing an excellent service and they're good at what they do but as far as you know it's maybe just them and a handful of employees and this stuff is so foreign to them they got to get them through some of that is very very difficult I had a guy come to me and say hey man I want a website and I'm like okay what do you what do you need your website to do because I always start with I tell people think of your website like an employee that works 24/7 to do something for you yeah right and so I said what is its job he said it needs to sell dirt and I said what and he said literally I need a picture of dirt that's sitting on my land and a phone number so people can call me to buy it I said dude go to Facebook just post it on Facebook you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a website to sell dirt and I think that's part of our job too as as designers and agencies is to let people know what's right for them even if it means losing business on our end yeah sometimes maybe just a Google business you know profile can do I've definitely told people that I've told them that look if you're just trying to reach people locally in the community Facebook works absolutely great for that that's what it was designed to do pretty much and as far as people looking you up online at Google business profile is what you need for sure to get started you know and and we can do that for a lot less than a website yeah two hours of labor or something super simple like that so I was gonna mention two that I talked to you I think Chantelle and Elijah both about this fantastic just contractor writer that I have and I take that onboarding form and add some of my own kind of notes to it from our discussion with the client and I give it to her and I say I need seven hundred and fifty or a thousand words of content and and what I do with that is once she gives it back it usually takes about a week then I send that document in a Google Doc straight to the client and I say here is what we came up with as content for your site and it's pretty close but it's not quite you just need to edit it into your own voice and a lot of times what I find is people are much more willing to edit than they are to produce anything and the feedback that I've gotten on that is is sometimes like you know we completely missed the mark which is I guess just an element of it but a lot of times there's not really that many tweaks and then they're really happy they feel like you're producing more for them you avoid that awful question of what am I paying you for I never want to hear that but that's something that I found in terms of processes is really nice like start with that onboarding forum move into the text copy and then kind of move into the design aspect of it I don't know if that resonates with any of you guys so one thing that kind of ties into this is we talked about scope creep a little bit kind of touched on that and that ties in with the contract and I have talked to other like really new freelancers and I've been asked how important is a contract what should be in it and won't that scare clients away so I'd love to hear each of your opinions on that you want it to scare them away right it's a filter it's a filtering tool yeah anyone who's not willing to read and understand and sign a contract is gonna be a problem customer absolutely most definitely so that's something that it's like one of those things that you could go google search like website design contract or social media marketing country but I I had that to start off with and then I paid an attorney here locally which costed me like I think it was like $1,200 yeah to have him review it and the stuff that he added and changed it was basically made that other one other one worthless like right it was things like you would never even think of if you're not an attorney like where where like what's the word like not trial but you know where the litigation would take place physically and like who pays for what all that kind of stuff you just never think of and and that was something I thought I was like people are never gonna sign this contract but he said exactly the same thing if they don't sign it you don't want them as a customer right I agree with that I think venue is a big deal where you currently where your business resides and because you know let's say if you have a client I have clients in Wyoming and West Virginia and things like that you certainly want to be it see on your home turf if it were to ever get to that point but also a big component of ours it's not just like the basics where you know okay this is the terms of how we're going to Bill you and how you're pay but everything that they give you they need to own it or they need to at least be willing to say that they believe they own it so that if you are sued really it's on them so if they give you photography or video or language or whatever they need to agree that that is something that they willingly own and have some rights to because that's not your job to know I think it's really it's terrifying how many people think they can google images and use them legally I mean I've had that discussion with several people I'm like no that's not how licensing works for for creative content so you do it you have to watch your back because they'll send you stuff that you can't legally use yeah they'll say just just throw this image up and then we always ask the question well where did you get this do you own this did you create this I mean a lot of the times we can redesign something that's going to give them the same you know purpose as what they found you know oh I found this just use that and that's like a huge red flag to us right but old your contract will protect you if they give you something if there's language in there about ownership and they give you something that really you just didn't check you shouldn't have to check it it's gonna always be on them that's a good point I'm writing that down I need to yeah for sure I think the the content piece is probably the biggest for all of us in that creative space regardless of industry like whether it's branding or social media or web sites but they're all they all kind of originate from the same place right like it's you have to develop the voice and kind of like you said Chantell the mission vision values of the company and that should guide everything else out words that I find that really interesting one thing I wanted to touch on which ties into kind of the contract element and all of this is gonna be different depending on your your sort of niche but how my pricing affect the way that an agency would grow like being a lower tier provider force mid tier versus you know super high end there's that middle middle balance where you guys find yourself and maybe where do you want to be I mean it's the question of the day right yeah it truly is because I I know like where our value positioning is in the market our rate is nowhere near where it should be comparatively we do frequent comp set analysis for our own agency but I think that there also is this what your market will hold what is comfortable what is going to encourage client confidence so there is a balance there you know one of the things and this kind of you know our climate is changing right now they're not like from a temperature perspective perspective we're just like a landscape and I'm like okay well do we take this time to completely analyze all of our services and our costs associated you know right now we have a flat rate but going back to one of your other questions Jonathan about what you spend your most time on that's not billable if I have to hear that can I pick your brain question one more time it in I think that you know as someone an agency our agent is very committed to collaborative efforts surely we're happy to do that but then where does it turn into business consultation that's time for me or an executive within our company for someone and should that be a different rate than our other services in our agency I think it's just a fantastic question and one I don't have to answer to I mean I'm sure Wade and Elijah you guys can both attest to how easily you know how often people friends family distant relatives you know friends of friends of friends would call and say hey I got a I got a virus on my computer what do I need to do I'm like oh yeah that'll be a hundred and ten dollars please like it doesn't work like that you don't get to call up your attorney and talk to him for free you're definitely gonna get a bill for every you know five minutes here on the phone so why should that be different for us right no it's amazing that is such a slippery slope you start down that road and and you can be absolutely inundated with calls just I mean I have a lot of friends and acquaintances and yeah they all know who I am they all know that I've been able to fix everything they've ever asked me right and that's a terrible position to be in it's just that is not it's not healthy to be the IT guy it is dangerous yeah until you start charging the money and then they quit call me yeah exactly but to do that you really have to get past that I call it imposter sender where you're like yeah I can do this but you know is it really worth that amount of money and once you realize you are an expert and that your time does have value it's really easy to charge everyone money for the things you know you weren't the expert Elijah they wouldn't even be asking you right exactly that's something that I was thinking about before this call a little bit your mindset plays into this totally that's a key point and I know for myself that's been that's I've been lacking that that concept that that's been a big problem for me it's just one mindset for this all because it's you know if I was doing this for myself I would see it as just a small small thing you know I need to throw up a new page now I put together a website for my plugin and and you know a few hours and yeah it doesn't look like much but it works and it's like why can't I offer that to somebody else you know but you know what that's not it you can't make a living doing that you know somebody in the in the live chat just said it's like being the only family member with a pickup truck on moving day oh yeah quiet truck just stop doing that yeah or have one that like doesn't have AC and like you know it's gonna break down it anymore nobody wants to use it but yeah there's there's an element to that you know it's amazing to to the point about being an expert that mindset of like being willing to charge it's crazy once I got over that hump how often people were willing to to pay the fee if I said it'll take me an hour that's gonna be a hundred bucks people are like okay but if you don't say that if you don't tell them this is what its gonna be they're just gonna take advantage of the situation maybe sometimes what you know no malicious intent but other times people are gonna be like hell yeah I'll get this done for free so and then you get back to the filtering piece of right charging people money gets you better people to work with typically though the low budget and free projects are always the nightmare right I don't know why must it they're the neediest clients when you give something away for free they want ten times as much as if someone's paying you five thousand dollars for a website great and I think that applies to small projects do absolutely exception for that has been for us our charitable donations you know we definitely do some pro bono work for nonprofits in our community that you know for we've built websites for free we've done social medium what we continue to do that we choose a nonprofit organization every year and for a couple of reasons one because our talent in our time will it's more of an impact to a bottom line than any check I can write you and so we can help generate revenue that way but it also has an incredible platform that has opened doors for us to new clients so a lot of the times the nonprofit's that we're giving free services to will have a board of directors that has you know lawyers banks financials you know retail whatever really CEOs and CEOs that are decision-makers we can demonstrate our thought process but then also give back to our community the same time and and potentially have new customers and it's a win-win in that respect that's extremely true right I really admire what you guys do with that with the nonprofit giving and and Chantal and I are on the board of non-profit here locally together and it's amazing the the power players that are in those groups and you just coming in with a referral from one person like if one person in that group believes and you suddenly your credibility is through the roof so like that time investment on the front end is super heavy but you guys have gotten quite a bit out of out of that work right quite a few sizable clients we really have it's honestly the best marketing dollar that we spend is donating our time and our services to nonprofit organizations and number yeah it fits with our core values I mean get generously it's a core value of ours yeah and we have a 24 hours of creativity for change event that we do every year on my grandmother Francis's birthday or we donate all 24 hours of that day to various nonprofit projects which also is a you know a really great PR platform it positions us in in a way that we do give generously and then it attracts customers that also have that same mindset it's a great match program for us I don't always have the opportunity to pitch the CEO of a company but if I can sit next to him on a board of directors and demonstrate what our organization does best that's way better than any sales pitch I can get my stuff line did you have a point wait I saw you about the time in ok it's just just a green yeah so in terms of like community involvement I know you guys in a small community ours is relatively small to like our metro area is probably like what thirty thousand maybe within a an hour in each direction yeah if that probably yeah maybe a bit less what what's the demographic look like for you guys in terms of population so where I'm at we have about twenty thousand in the whole county believe our town is maybe ten or twelve thousand and then has a few smaller towns spread around so really rural and mostly factory driven there's a lot of agriculture too but but really really small town America yeah I always tell people I'm in the middle of a cornfield basically yeah I literally in I I live right behind a pivot irrigation system here probably you know a quarter mile off of pavement um but yeah we're about an hour from Boise Idaho so we're close to some bigger towns but everything around here is really small and entirely Agron pretty much so we should probably have another call one day about like SEO tactics to rank in other cities that you're not physically in I think that'd be something that would really resonate with with people myself included and see if we can pull in some folks to talk about that because it seems like if you're just an hour from Boise it stands to reason you could say you're like a Boise web development firm and same thing for you Elisha like sure like chantels office is across the bridge from you know basically are gonna be focus area but we're both still over there every single day well not anymore but we were yeah so that's definitely something that we could we could talk about too so one thing I wanted to talk about we've talked we've sort of touched on contracts and scope creep and you know like enforcing your your own kind of hourly rate and stuff what about how do you enforce your own policies and enforce your own contract without coming across as like anti client so like if somebody says like you know I'm looking for this bit and you didn't include that in your contract that can feel very that can feel like a difficult conversation to have to say I would be happy to do it but it's gonna cost you X Y Z sure so email helps a lot because you don't have to say anything that feels mean over the phone but when I when I've run into that basically I'm always just you know they'll say hey this websites great but can we make it like eBay but better and I'll say well you know that wasn't in the original scope so I definitely can but it'll cost you this much money and they never reply going backwards if you didn't have that that scope to fall back on you might feel obligated or they might say it's hard to say no if you haven't already told them that you can't say no yeah yeah definitely we have some language and all of our agreements that basically informs our clients they can change the scope of the project at any time we are happy to change the scope of the project at any time but when that occurs we will send them a new estimate and a new contract and proposal agreement and they initial that so whether they read it or not is up to them but it does give us a basis for being able to go back and say sure we're happy to switch gears and change the scope and I'll send you a new estimate of what that will cost and it really is a never a question it's just a mutual understanding and an expectation at that point and that goes back to getting those quality clients people are going to do that for their own business to their clients so it seems like it would be an expectation to have it sort of from you to them for projects like this especially something as like personalized as websites and branding and social media definitely and then one thing I wanted to touch on is in terms of processes so we that the overall topic here is scaling and so what about building sort of onboarding processes and involving your client in the the process so maybe you can disconnect yourself a little bit more so that then you're able to take on more like I I don't have any actual employees but since I've found a few really great contractors I've been able to take on more work than I ever would have been before but you have to have something for your client to be involved in and for a contractor to know sort of that process do you guys have any insight into how to build that that sort of internal process well I want to make sure I'm totally understanding what you're saying I'm sorry totally finite we for us there's never a disconnect between the client and our team so the initial may be prospective or what we consider to be business develop it might happen between the client and one person but once that once that organization becomes a client of ours it's so important that the project team members on our team whether they're employees of Francis Roy or they're a mix of employees and fulfillment contractors are engaged so it could be a zoom call or it can be a face-to-face or whatever that ends up being we certainly brought freelancers in as a part of our project teams and they participate in those discovery meetings and so it really is an all-hands-on-deck now it's not that looks different depending on the scope of the project sometimes projects are just consultations and that's a one-to-one but if it's a really large branding project you know our content director will be there Hilary our art director janae will be there you know copywriters and you know it just kind of depends and it really is project a project so that's absolutely helpful what I what I meant to try to get across was sort of you as the business owner like all of us here being able to focus on the higher level tasks and kind of focusing on what is is you know billing at that hundred plus dollar an hour rate and and that way you can kind of step back from not the minutiae but the day-to-day of the actual task work if that makes any sense if y'all figured that out you let me know yeah yeah I think it comes down to learning just learning delegation and triage and prioritization right so delegation is really hard especially as you know someone that is essentially a one-person agency yeah you do everything you feel like you have the control you can control the quality I think if you're delegating work to others you have to accept a somewhat lesser quality than what you would put out not that it's worse but it's gonna be different and you can nitpick anything you know even if you do it somebody else could nitpick your work so you have to realize that that being that is coming from an external source there are going to be problems and I heard someone say once that if you're delegating 80% is okay because that extra 20% there is you you're the filter so you can take it and make adjustments and ask for things to be different but really learning to delegate I think is the hardest part because you can find really talented people within you know good hourly rate ranges but if you don't know how to let go of control a little bit and let those people do their job it's never gonna work and if you micromanage them they'll quit yeah which they should well and together with that if you don't have some of the processes in place regarding content collection all this you don't have anything to hand off to your to your doing it exactly if it's that's been that's been my issue is it's like okay yeah I'm to the point now where I've got enough sales that I could I could handle you're not bringing on a few outside contractors but my my process through the whole thing is so terrible that you know I don't have a package of content and in you know branding and design direction that I can hand off to somebody I know some very talented people that do far better it you know the actual design of the site than me right and I and I would love to hand it off to them and say hey you know you give me the the PSD file and I'll do the coding you know but how can I take unless I have in place what we've talked about earlier how can I bring them into the loop because I don't have anything to hand off I just got this you know mix-matched collection of stuff that I'm trying to force dude come up on my own right over there less did you go ahead Chantal that's interesting I remember at each point that we did deliberate scale it was like our customer user personas got more dialed in as our team grew larger and I think that that was whoa first of all it had to be intentional because as I was doing a skills assessment of our team of myself what can I do what do I bring to the table and if we want to scale who do I need in order to make that scale I found that the larger we got larger we have a team of you know six full-time folks but larger that we got the more dialed in our customer persona got and so it became okay now we're looking for a more targeted type of customer I think to your point wait because we needed our customer to be engaged in a certain way in order for our deliverables to be what they from a productivity and efficiency and a quality perspective what we were going to be happy with yeah like building that process for me looked like because I'm still technically like a one-man show but I have some really great contractors and what I what I personally found was I'm I was using Basecamp for a while as my project management system but I mentioned switching billing systems to Zoho books I think it's called and so I'm in Soho projects but what I what I did was I spent an entire day building a template and kind of a workflow for every project and breaking out every individual task so it went from onboarding form to kind of the site map of the site getting the documents and kind of pictures and everything all together and having just like a step-by-step checklist so then it wasn't entirely unclear to somebody outside like okay this is the flow and this is what I'm responsible for so then plugging somebody into that task kind of gave them an idea like all right this is my little box too - and this is what I know I can kind of count on my task being I know what I've done and so I think what's weird about it is it's almost like you know building a website and using the verbage like we we as the agency when it's one man but it's the same thing with like building these processes it's like you have nobody going through it yet but you will if you have it there and it takes time to build that it's kind of challenging and it always changes like I find myself going back and tweaking the process and asking different questions and it's definitely an evolving process I would say you're never quite done with it right and that comes back to the the old wisdom of fake it till you make it right because if you're already pretending that you're delegating these tasks to yourself I guess then if somebody else comes into the fold it's easy to say okay you do these things cuz you already have the process is broken out like you said yeah yeah and chantal with the team as large as yours I'm sure you can speak to this more than I can but there's something to be said for keeping people in their specific skill set so like all of us here are capable of doing at least in a certain sense what each other does but like each of us are better at our own specific tasks than others like over the last two years I've found that I enjoy and actually feel like I'm better at the sales and kind of networking side of things than I am the web development or the design so I have a that you know like I said the text copywriter a graphic designer to do website mock-ups and fantastic developers and so that's that's been really important for me to pull myself out of that not only do I spend less time on the projects but the end result is better so I don't know if that's how you guys operate Chantel in terms of everyone has a specific Lane almost yeah so we have six people on our team and everyone does for the most part have a specific Lane I think it's also as a business owner you have to determine where your lane is and you have to stay in it also you know and trust that the team that you have is you know they're there because they're talented and you chose them and they were an integral part of your scaling you know we use asana for project management and I really like that I've used Basecamp with other agencies and asana was a better fit for me but I think as our team has grown it it shocked me all of the things that we needed um it was so much easier when it was just me right I didn't have to worry do we have enough storage you know where you know how are we gonna be transferring you know keeping I just knew where all that stuff was and now I have to make sure that we have all of these resources and tools for our entire team and frankly everyone likes what they like you know like half our team likes Mack and half our team doesn't and you know these are all problems like when I was just working for myself I it was like I'm a Mac you just don't even have those questions you know and so there are some struggles but the rewards are you can do more work and you can do more of the work that you want to do with a team my idea yeah I think that's really true you can you can take on more the end result tends to be better and on paper you would look like my my struggle even just a year ago was like well I just I just bid 2,500 on this site but each person chops into it a little bit more and then I'm like but that piece of the pie is so much smaller than this piece of the pie but then once I realized but I can duplicate this pie you know five more times in the same time period that that to me it was like okay that's how you start turning it into what I would consider a proper agency I feel like regardless of what kind of niche you're in wait you asked the question in our chat the other day and then also earlier about niching down into a specific niche or niche as people call it like the idea of focusing on one industry do any of you guys do that actively we tried yeah I don't - it didn't work maybe yeah I guess some of probably my biggest reason for going that direction was because of my failings in some of these other areas you know because just looking at it from somebody that hasn't been there and done that it looks easier for me to to niche down into one thing you get to know that industry because then I could be like I can just tell my clients well you need this and you need this this you know yeah and I wouldn't have to wait for them to come up with all this content and it's tough I could I know what works for them already better than they do which is a pretty common occurrence anyways but yeah look I guess listening to you all talk and some that I and I've known some of this neat down that really it's my processes that need to change you know and that there would be a way to to work through some of that and I I've always hesitated to niche down it kind of goes against what I want for my agency because I want people in my local community you know I want two people to be able to come to me and that need help with their marketing and if they're a decent client I don't want to have to turn them down just because they don't fit in my particular niche that I'm focusing on that that kind of goes against me internally I don't know why but it's just yeah just kind of where I'm at okay if you have the ability to help somebody why turn them down just because they don't fit in the box yeah yeah but go ahead Chantal well I mean for us when we first started we wanted to be in the social marketing is specifically in the sustainability sphere that was my background so that's where we went but then it became that we had opportunities to work for these parallel industries who really were impacting the Meech industry that we wanted to be in and so I don't know we kind of expanded outside that what I will say though is something that we do is we have exclusivity agreements with our clients so we don't work for their competitors and that just keeps our work a very high level of integrity and ethics so we're not pitting restaurants you know we don't we don't I never understood how people accomplish that honestly you know how do you work for two separate restaurants in the same market that are competing against each other and do your absolute best work and so I wouldn't say we need to but we definitely provide some exclusivity so to your point Wade I think that feeling kind of comes our IT background like niching down is like the fact that if let's say you were working for hospitals it's like you know what line of business offer they use you know what their network needs you know all the ins and outs of that but I don't find that same correlation in the web space personally because every business is going to have a little bit of a different need every industry is obviously going to be different but even like to two companies in the same niche tend not to have the same web apps and need for a website sometimes their line of business software does something that the other doesn't so for me personally one thing that's really interesting is looking back over the last year I think I did like I don't know like 15 or 16 different news sites but only one of them was a duplicate in terms of niche and that wasn't an intentional effort it just kind of happened that way so having the processes help you work in that industry without really knowing it but I do look forward to the day that somebody else calls me up from an issue I've already done and I'm like actually I know how to do that there's a lot of diapers that keeps you fresh like being able to work for all of these this diverse group of clients I would say that's true yeah what were you gonna say I am an agency a couple guys from an agency at WordCamp us last year and they exclusively did I think it was dentists websites or plastic surgeons or something like that and they had like 2,500 active maintenance clients that were paying them per month right so I talked to him about it one of the big things was that these these niche industries have conferences kind of like word camp where everybody gets together and talks right so you have a lot of connectivity between clients and a lot of travel of word-of-mouth so I think it can be beneficial but I think thinking oh I know how to do this kind of site like you said every every iteration of that's gonna be a little different unless you do something like some of these companies I've seen like movie theater sites there are companies that exclusively host and provide movie theater sites because a lot of movie theaters use the same API feeds and stuff right what they've done is they've they've templatized it right so it's more like a website as a service thing I think that can be beneficial but if you're doing bespoke designs then even within the same narrow field you're gonna have a lot of variation anyways yeah I may as well just focus broadly it's kind of like for us Jen tell the vacation rental industry we have some huge national well honestly worldwide players that have these boilerplate sites and you can see you don't even have to know who they are you just look at the opening you know content of the site and you can immediately tell this is by XYZ there's a there's three or four of those here locally that I could I get name off the top of my head that are in that same kind of position yeah I think it's interesting that what you're saying Alijah cuz I have frequently come across potential clients that are like hey what do you think about this website we get it for free because it's our industry so something that really sticks out to me here is a funeral home the funeral homes industry if y'all could just infiltrate that industry I think there is a lot of potential there because there are companies that are providing free funeral home websites for funeral homes I mean if you think you're a mortician can you think of a larger grade of separation between a mortician and a website developer right so you know there are these companies that are selling them free sites but then they're also getting some sort of kickback from like flour sales or and then that site is really that's not really the main focus that company and I apologize if I am like trashing somebody that's listening here they're not really website people at all they're like sales people ancillary products so they're getting a kickback from and so these poor Funeral Homes have crappy websites mm-hmm but they're functional and they're there they're they have guest books or they have whatever I don't know do you all have any opinion about that do you see that because we see that sometimes we see that with lawyers in our town is we have a few that that we do IT work for and they have a website I'm like hey let me build your website and like we have one we don't need one so I go to it and it's terrible and I'm like who does your website they're like I don't know this company and I'm like what do you pay them they're like I don't know but they put us in the Yellow Pages and I'm like they don't know what they're paying they don't know what they're supposed to be getting but these companies get in and lock them into contracts and then it's too much of a hassle to try to get a hold of anybody to get out of it so they just keep trucking along with what they have and I think there is there's a predatory aspect to some of those companies and I won't say any names in particular and we think I can remember them but I think small businesses do get trapped because of the lack of knowledge they don't really know what goes into it so when someone comes to them and says hey I can give you a site and advertising and SEO for 150 bucks a month or so yeah like they jump on it because they're like oh then everything's taken care of for me I don't have to worry about it it's not yeah it's not always just 150 a month I mean I've ran into some potential clients that they're paying 500 a month for yeah nothing I mean it's a templated site kind of like what you were discussing earlier here and and it's terrible it's just but it's like hey they're doing it and it's it's hands-off and the the key thing is they didn't have to generate any of the content for it either probably it's just you know generic very generic wording and stuff and it looks kind of a keyword stuff you know and yeah yeah we just had one that was an appraiser that had a website and I went he wanted to move off of that onto one of our platforms and I went to it to grab content I'm like okay there's a ton of content here doesn't really fit with the scope of what we're building you so which parts do you want and he literally said I don't want any of that nonsense they put that up there I don't know what any of it is and when I got to looking at it it was just keyword stuffed content don't write a rank for SEO and I've seen that too yeah that's a bad representation of your business and that's the key all right these people need to understand that most people are going to Google your business name when they hear who you are and what they find can inform their opinion of what the rest of your business looks like yeah that ties into you guys can tell perfectly for sure yeah definitely I mean I think it sounds to me like we need a partner with more website people because we can create I mean but in and I think that's why our partnership and our relationship with Jonathan and apex is so you really have to cross the battle lines and find the people that offer what you don't yeah he certainly offers things that we don't and various other partnerships that we have you know we have worked with other website firms and stuff and so it just kind of depends on what your client needs but you know I love the quote like the difference between a pebble in the mountain is who you ask to move it you know I'm looking for my pebbles that's what I'm looking for yeah that's my mountains do you and I think that it's been very helpful our business super true yeah wait what are you gonna say I got some good team that say that we're just mentioned so Blanco we go that way yeah I mean really like the the idea of us all staying in our own lanes like what you actually excel at like I think I can speak for for Elijah and wait you guys are both awesome developers and it's like I certainly am NOT a designer I don't consider myself a super-strong developer but I can totally translate that like I T kind of terminology to that sales conversation with the client and so that's what I'm trying to build my company around is that's where I'm plugging myself in and finding people to fill those other gaps down the line and and honestly not even down the line sort of everybody's in the same playing field everybody has an equally important responsibility that's the aim for my agency so yeah I think this really comes down to a couple of like the main four areas that I had was client management so that's sort of like who's the ideal client contracts how to say no they filter out the tire kickers then the automation side of things like what can you automate in terms of getting things off your plate that onboarding process contract generation you know it's amazing I am NOT getting paid to say this but with the the Zoho business suite they have this awesome tool that they call Soho flow and whenever my my onboarding form comes in it automatically inputs to the CRM and then there's a little little checkbox that I hit that says ready to bill and then ready for contract and based on all the stuff that they filled in it automatically generates the contract for you so puts in their name pricing and scope of work and everything so I don't even have to do anything anymore like I'm not inputting client information I'm not doing anything like that and the only thing I have to do is go basically hit the send button on the contract and you know obviously things change so it's like a draft but I love that like business process onboarding or excuse me like the like building those internal processes and that automation that gets me excited probably from the IT background to the point of automation one thing it's a really really low cost that I use extensively is Trello which most people are probably familiar with that's a project management tool but they they incorporated Butler which is an automation tool kind of like some of the other ones that you see that can tie into various services but now Trello owns Butler so there's a butler button on every Trello board where you can enable automations like if I move this card to this column add this label and add this checklist and then if I complete this checklist move it to the completed column and things like that that's cool I see yeah you can build custom workflows really easily in Trello and I don't even think you have to have a paid account to use some of that but to lift some of the limits it's like five bucks a month so definitely worth looking into if you want to spend some time to build a customized workflow the other thing is most forum plugins have a Trello integration right though you can have those with those form submissions go straight into a Trello card with custom fields and everything else and then have those automations kick in that automation component is so so huge and then having that project management system be up to date and keep it up even if you're the only one that uses it like getting this stuff out of my brain personally helps me disc an at you know five o'clock when I'm trying to sign off for the day I'm not sitting here thinking like alright what do I need to scribble down on this piece of paper so tomorrow when I come back into the office I don't forget and then the client doesn't text me a week from now and say hey where's that thing you said you were gonna do for me yeah pieces of paper are the bane of our existence yes because you lose them I actually am consulting with some of our IT clients to get them onto Trello because I've asked them I've been asking people like people that are CEOs and stuff like what do you do to organize your projects because I'm always interested in being more efficient and most of them just point to a pile of post-it notes on their desk so I think everyone can benefit from having some kind of tangible way to put those notes and all the different information into a searchable format which is super critical because then later if you're like oh I know I did this thing but I don't remember when or how you can search for it and find it and you have an archive to fall back on to yeah so yeah the automation bit and then billing and invoicing getting paid that's that's the biggest thing but all that you've already defined in your contract so that sort of takes care of itself so we're coming up on the hour so I don't want to take up all of your time I definitely appreciate all of your fantastic insight hopefully there's at least some tidbits each of you guys can pull out and anybody watching hopefully this has been beneficial for you hopefully we can come up with another topic title that everyone finds interesting and continue this I've really enjoyed it awesome thanks very very good been a pleasure thank you

Channel: Permaslug

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Id: yC-phJngv7k

Length: 63min 27sec (3807 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020