 All right welcome to vlog. There's a somewhere between episode 50 and 70. We don't know. We forgot to look before you started. We have a new cast member with us today. Well Melissa's been around for a while. She's worked for us for a while. And also someone had a really good point Marvin and I screwed this up and you should have stopped me from screwing up. Oh yeah I know. So on my Sunday morning live stream podcast we always intro us every time. That way if you get a new subscriber, they don't have to find figure out who the hell you are. Yeah and someone says hey you had people on the other time. You don't introduce even yourself. So if I start at episode between 50 and 70, I have no history with you guys. I'd like to know your name. So I'm Tom Lawrence. This is Melissa. This is Marvin. I'm Marvin. Hi. We're not all Lawrence's but no. No. We are all school chums if you want to know that. We all grew up together. All grew up together. And same neighborhood like you were on you were a couple streets over but yeah. Yeah which is oddly I mean you came into my office. How long you've been 10 years? It's yeah I think it was like 2008. Yeah around 2010 years. Wow. So Melissa does all the web development for LTS Creative and does all the back end magic that Tom doesn't do. So if you wonder why the rub says pretty it's not because of me. Yes and so we've been working on it. So we're gonna talk more today about LTS Creative. We actually have a lot of stuff we're gonna talk about next week related to Lawrence systems in general because we've been so busy so we're actually gonna catch up on all the projects next week. We're working on one of them is redoing all of our workflows redoing our invoicing system and it's all open source. So I'm going to work with getting all its invoice ninja if you want to look it up. No secrets about what the software is but I'm gonna put a bunch of try to work with the developers and maybe create some more documentation because we spent a lot of time learning the system we imported over 6,000 clients into it now. So we've put it to the test so far. So we're gonna do some sessions. I think I just invoiced ninja. Yeah. I'm gonna make some tutorials and it's such a good a good problem but this week is all about LTS Creative. Yes. So Melissa tell us all about LTS Creative. Tom and I are going to have coffee. Hello. This is a little nervous today if you can't tell. I'm a little camera shy. And we roped her into this. Yeah we just kind of surprised. We're like hey come by for some meetings tomorrow and come a little early. She knows me the YouTube thing and she's just like you guys do video websites. Not into the hot sauce. That's all. I'll talk about LTS Creative. Yeah. The hot sauce is a thing. That's why she doesn't actually have like an office here because you have to like the hot sauce to have an office here because you just never know when it's gonna be in something. Yeah I'm not gonna be hazed with that. And yeah mostly Melissa works from home when she's not shuffling around children and all that. She's working on websites. Just got back from a trip to Mexico. Yes. I returned. I saw some pictures. Very gorgeous. Yeah we went to the Monarch Reserves. We went to three different reserves in the mountains and it was pretty interesting. We got to experience the you know country rural life and then the city life which is the Mexico City is amazing. Did you bring back any tequila? We have tequila chocolate. I should have brought that today. You absolutely should have. We would have done tequila in the morning per vlog Thursday for sure. I tried Moscow for my first time and that was pretty interesting. It's kind of like the Grappa of tequila. Okay. So yeah yeah that was very good. Any Hayahuasca? I don't know about that. What is that? It's just psychedelic. Oh no. Obviously not. It's this drink that they make out of like a specific cactus down there that like they do it for like shamanic journeying or whatever but like you drink it like it's like it's supposed to be just like a crazy like you drink it and then you get sick and then you just have like crazy visions and no but you know I did order a dark beer there and apparently I'm sure it's the same thing. No it's not. You know what they brought me? I sent a survey Sunday and they bring me dosa key in a glass with Coca-Cola and a shot of whiskey and apparently that's just a thing down there that I didn't even know about. So I was just expecting like Negro Modella. Yeah right but no they just know. So everything comes with a shot of whiskey is that? No you order a dark. If you say Cerveza Negro, then you're getting beer with whiskey and Coca-Cola. Oh interesting. Okay. And then the rim is salted with like this cayenne sugar and salt. Wow. And it's a thick and I had to like literally scrape it off because it was way too much. Before I travel there I will make sure I'm saying that right because that was exactly that. It's crazy right? And I looked at I'm like what did she just bring me and then we tried to order chips but we didn't realize what we didn't know what the chips you know translation was and apparently it's to popos. Okay. But that's American thing. They don't like have chips available there. They have to go and make them because it's like how my friend when he went to China was so disappointed. He goes Chinese food is not like rich and it's like some rice with a little bit of stuff. Oh yeah. He's like it's not because I wanted saucy sweet Chinese deep fry. I ordered Almond Chicken in an authentic Chinese restaurant in San Francisco several years ago because I like Almond Chicken right? Yeah. I got rice with chicken and almonds. I was like this is it. I was like almond is supposed to be gravy and this should be fried. Yeah. And they don't really fry anything there. Yeah. It's from we fry everything here in America. I think we ruin Mexican food. I think we ruin all of it. Whatever country we get food from we're like just yeah just fry it. Did you have any like small injuries down there? So a friend of mine went to Mexico many years ago and she she was like scooting her chair in and like cut her finger right? So they saw that and these guys ran and they brought her two shots of tequila. One to dip her finger in and then and then and want to shoot for like the inconvenience. Yes. But yeah they just brought in like sent them down and she was like looking like I don't understand. I'm gonna cut my finger first thing in Mexico is when you get two free. Right. So he like grabbed her finger and put it in the one shot glass and then like handed her the other one and was like drink it. She's like all right. All right. This is our show title now how to get two free shots of tequila. I just cut your finger. So that sounds awesome but now you're back and ready to get to work. Yes I am. I was ready yesterday. And most is here today because there's a bunch of meetings and so this is where we actually when we're not filming we actually turn this back into a meeting room. Work does get done here on the campus. Work does get done. We have some more websites to sell more meetings to meet with. We have a yacht club. So yeah that's a surprise. She's finding out right now. Can we do on-site meetings? Yes we can. Can we schedule this in June, July? Yeah well that's a project we're bidding right now. Well I have it's a mess and we'll talk about that offline. And this is actually a challenge we face when doing websites. I told them let's do a new website because there's this broken and got hacked. Another guy was kind of sort of starting to do it. He's a friend contributing and it's all a mess. They have some data from the old guys. They go can you look at fixing it versus bidding it new? I said bid it new. And you're like well we want to look at fixing it. I said all right you have to give me more time to examine the mess. It's like finding a needle in a haystack when things go wrong with sites sometimes. Well even fixing it though like it usually it turns into just redoing the whole thing. I mean we have told them that. We have another. It needs to be fixed for a reason. Either the plugins are outdated or code's wrong or they're not keeping it secure. We're bidding a trucking company as well one of our clients. And like they have an existing website yes was done by a friend of a friend who has a company. It's not terrible but for us to make it what they want even though it's technically fixing the website we're really going to be redoing it for the most part. Now the good news is they have good verbiage so the the typing is good and all that the the content is there so we copy paste it. The photos are generic stuff so we're going to actually put real photos in there and make that all pretty. So it's one of those aggravations when people hand you projects. Can't you just kind of use what I have and tweak it so it looks beautiful like the website. I look over here I'm like no there's a framework and underlying mess. Audit the site you know we want to be good a good representation of your company and you do that through user experience. So we want to provide that to your clients. And there's a lot of thought and this is well not as much me you must have put this in there. It's kind of flow of where the where the data is going so when you put something here so it brings your eyes to where they need to go next to try to flow. So yeah and people don't think enough about that. It's not just a website with a few pages and about us. There's kind of a presentation to it. And we've really brought that out like the new Total Health Food Zone River. I'll leave that link there so you don't have to Google it in the description. But they were a fun job and I love their website. It really makes you want food which is great. Actually I look at a website and I go down the street and go get my lunch. So great for them terrible for my pants. Yeah because I just have to keep buying bigger and bigger ones. Yeah they have so much good food there. Even though it's a health food store if you eat a ton of it you'd still you know. And have we um and I even followed up with this have we boosted the video we did for them yet? I would before how many views did it get was about 8,000. The view just just organically the it got over 8,000 views I think. Before we spent the first dollar with them they're thrilled. So 8,000 and the bottom line with any of this and I hate all the buzzwords that people throw in when it comes to social media is we you want to know if the client converted or if there's results not just we do great social media whatever we'll we'll get all these views because the views are cool but if no one bought your stuff why'd you get them? They actually had people come in. That's the important part they had people come in they had people comment on the videos wow I did not know this was here do you have this and then they were responsive yes we have the thing you're looking for and I'm coming to your store and these were people from other cities that just didn't know that that was just from friends sharing it. It was already new of Total Health and shared it. That's what I really like to see and what really helps grow these things is people were just either commenting with like hey so-and-so and tagging their friend did you know about this or hey this is perfect for you or just sharing it out to their friends. Yeah people start tagging her and I think part of it is so the sisters that own the business and run it are well known and have a lot of friends but they themselves don't really use Facebook. Yeah they're not just not there but this is not their thing and that's fine. So we actually were able to easily capitalize people want to support them but they don't know how and it's not as easy to support them unless they have something shareable. So making a video interview that we did with them was the shareable component that people said oh we love a net. And there's quality behind it too that makes people want to share it. Yeah there's some production value so you can't just put anything out there. Right. So that strategy is and this is how we work with the clients that come up with a strategy that we know is easy for them so they actually other than spending the money with us for production it's not had to cost them a lot and add by money because they just had to have something people share and people because they like them anyways were easy to share it. If you're not likable you're gonna have to spend a lot of money on ads. Yeah that's true yeah if you are likable you can probably sneak by. Yeah we have not handed you that client. Okay. It's coming though. We have one they will remain on name but my answer to him he has a ton of bad google reviews. I know you had a guy like this too. Oh yeah. Yeah it's the same scenario and when he asked me he goes what can I do about all these bad google reviews. Change your business practice. I said quit being an asshole I mean like seriously. That'll resolve it. I had no other response for him he laughed he goes but I make a lot of money doing is I'm like I'm sure you do. Yeah it's unfortunate that you do. Yeah and he says well what else do you think I do I said you know I once drove through a picket line to go fix your computer I said I can't even say that about a single other client there were people picketing in front of your building and he just kind of chuckled. Some people measure success in the number of protesters that pick at their business. I don't know any kind of publicity. Yeah I don't I don't know am I wrong by supporting his business and I don't support him like verbally I just fix his computers and don't give him discounts. He breaks stuff we fix it. I know he just he makes poor choices he hires some the shoddy workers to do things that cause angry people because they paid him this to get to the job he finds the cheapest person for the job they don't do it right and the people get angry at him and uh he screwed over in common tale. He screwed over a group of people and that's what the protesters are about which kind of oddly uh the details of it weren't completely his fault because a natural disaster actually caused him to do it but then when he wouldn't give them the refunds in Tiley Manor and it was thing is because of a natural disaster he should have filed an insurance claim but he didn't and just screwed them not my fault the natural disaster happened and they they have to I won't give them their money back but he can't service it either but he actually did buy the thing it was a mess either way we those customers are a pain and they exist and uh we try to avoid most of them which are really hard to help yeah they are it's like we should add like a we should add like a you're a jerk service fee to people yeah like like oh you know what I mean we're gonna take your money but we don't support what you're doing exactly yeah I yeah someone I've had someone approaching about doing some political stuff and it's actually on both sides for the D and the R we've got two things coming up and I'm like I don't know I mean that's even weirder these two people are in different categories and do not compete against each other but it's really interesting and I'm one of them I actually I'm more aligned with than the other and I'm not going to get political on it but what they're doing the causes they run for but I mean that's also a weird thing is do we support that do we do both sides do we list ourselves as that so I've kind of thought about it because the political market has become lucrative or social media over the last few years the senators realized they can't just you know not have websites not have media presence so we're wrestling with that because for the most part one of them that's real serious about it easily is alignable because they they generally have a lot of good policies that I looked at I'm like wait this is completely or community driven a lot of things that I think sense we are supposed to get a meeting I just see her her husband email me and I have some a campaign experience now behind under my belt so yeah so it's and it's and now this is for a state seat so okay yeah see I think we if I don't say I mean I don't see the issue with it I mean obviously if we look at it and go it's a this is a person who we find completely despicable yeah there's a there's a line that can be drawn but you can also go like the Moby route where like was it Cadillac like Moby was like the the musician he's like you know I know I want to take money or whatever I'm going I'm gonna tell you he like Cadillac said that we want to use one of your songs I think it was Cadillac whoever it was and he was like yeah sure he charged them an insane amount of money to use it and then he took that money and donated it to like you know EP era like environmental yeah you know whatever he believed right so you know that's interesting like kind of you know if we do find a despicable person do we just charge them a ton of money and then like and then like you know and then donate to another campaign or something like I don't know oh wouldn't that be funny oh my god right like we just charge the rules on that like you're a despicable politician we're going to take your money and then we're going to use it to offset the cost of this guy who we think is good I don't know I think at the end of the day he should feel good about your job and your work and what you're doing so and just saying hey well we do have moral ethics and we have turned down some stuff that I'm just like I won't work for some people yeah yeah and like the one that you had was it about a year or two ago the person just like can I just can't you just fake create me another google location or something they had like a whole list of things yeah tiring and they had no interest in changing your business practices no and that's what I was saying I said this is going to continue to happen it's going to be chasing I'm going to be chasing this you know maybe not beating it but these things are going to keep piling up on you and unless you change your ways and on a related note we had another client who kept getting himself blacklisted on emails because he kept doing shady ways to collect email addresses but he he has come around and now just says fine you guys are smart and I just pay you to do it so they came off with the less than ethical side is where they started but he learned through those experiences after being blacklisted from all these companies yeah after being unable to send out his newsletters yeah and then newsletters are a direct impact on his business so being blacklisted was not good in business for him yeah he's he's also the same person who's come around on the fact that he just tries to come up with ways to hire people behind their backs and stuff like that yeah he's tried to hire my staff I had actually got rid of staff before Melissa and he hired them directly and that turned into kind of a mess um they didn't do the job either that's why I got rid of them as an employee and then he did the job for him and then he called me I gave so and so money and they didn't do the job I like well they don't work for you no more I know I heard them directly I said what do you want me to do about it yeah you want me to go over her house and go get it and I'm like I go no no you didn't pay me do you want to pay me to go over her house and knock on her door I mean what do you want me to do about this he hired her yeah you hired her she is your problem directly now so that's when I came along that's when Melissa came along and 10 years later we're still having Melissa here we are you know most of the people uh Marvin's the only person Marvin's the youngest uh time worker I've no Marvin for a long time yeah uh Steve's been here for 13 years I think well you're looking it up but you've been here that long you make me feel like a dinosaur yeah well I've been here just over a year so yeah but if you need anything related design check out LTS creative uh we definitely are pushing a lot with it it's there's a lot of cool stuff you can get on there and you don't have to be in here now for us to do the filming work that we do that we did for total health we have to be close but if you just need your website redone definitely we can do that if you're especially we know we have a lot of IT people that look for do websites we are an IT company and if you're out of state it's not like there's any conflict of interest matter of fact we can do that on side note and I sent this to Marvin if I sent it to you so I got an email from a guy from Kenya and uh he needed he had some computer questions which I answered and he had his website link in there and I'm gonna flat out call him out he copied our website yeah different design completely but the words the verbiage copy posted and changed name yeah yeah so ours has like you know our technology history of the company he reworded all of that to his aren't you flatter though I mean that's how I feel yeah I feel as though it's a flattery thing they even say we focus on technology you can focus on your business that's the title I took your tagline yeah and I don't know that tagline if you google it comes up in my website last I checked because I'm doing I've had that tagline for a long time their uh their um their location has a cooler name though if you if you google the address excitement hotel the exciting hotel the that's actually the title that's the name I'm sure it's an I'm sure it's an interpretation from Kenya sure but it's titles because it's doing English translation right yeah it says the exciting hotel exciting hotel I searched up I he gives like a vague address but when I pull that's the only thing in the area but it's truly Kenya it's kind of cool because they have google maps you can see pictures of it and stuff it's actually really neat yeah so and we're pretty we're we're pretty sure it's right down the street from Obama's birthplace if you fall out if you fall into you know the birther side of things yeah whatever that's over there's plenty of other things to worry about now remember when that was the least of our problems oh my god yeah I haven't been something absurd on twitter every five minutes you probably get into that right thanks for watching like and subscribe um we got do you have anything else you'd like to say or add Melissa um you should hire us you should hire us we are keep Melissa busy you're the best yes we take kind of a unique approach though right when you say I mean a lot of companies they they have a template that they're going to try to fit you into like they use us you know they're like we're going to fit you into this website template we're going to make five facebook posts every month we're going to make two twitter posts every and you know every week or whatever and that's just I mean that's a generalized way you can do things but we prefer and the way we do things is we talk with you and we say what is going to work for you this during this period of time right right like maybe you don't need five facebook posts a month this time you need to focus on building your email list or something so we're gonna we're gonna design right we're going to design a strategy for this time period that is going to accomplish that goal next month it might be different you know next month maybe it does make sense to do the five facebook posts and the two twitter whatever but it may not be every time so we're not going to lock in and say these are the things we're going to do every month or every so often whatever our time period is that we agree with uh with you we're going to we're going to design a strategy that works for you specifically with quality content yeah exactly if you uh I mean there are options out there like wix or square space uh if you have the choosers you choose square space at least is a little bit more reputable wix is a disgusting company um and pain work with but I mean if you're looking for I want to spend 29.95 a month and just have something auto magic that looks like everybody else's site because you don't care that's fine and that's not our market if you're looking for something like that uh custom design work means custom design work unique branding and a lot of thought put into it it's so I've directed people people say hey can you do a website for a few hundred bucks no but you can go to square space and just drag it on and it's good for like an online business card I would say yeah nothing really interactive you know if you need specialized forms and stuff like that you're not going to really get all of that and because the way they template her industry if people are looking for competitors I've seen this before I'm like hey look they clearly use the same template these two companies yeah and uh look they're competing and I'm supposed to choose one of them and they use the same square space template I mean they're pretty right but you know if you're not I mean I think what makes us unique too is that we have customized photography which is huge a lot of people don't want to use the stock anymore because you don't you see the same people the same model yeah exactly right I laugh because like everyone I'm sorry IT people but all of you have you seen that one where they draw a cloud it's like everybody uses the yeah everyone you sit and just six their logo in the middle of it I'm sorry and they're all looking like this we should create our own yeah we totally should yeah and video being I know we said like you know you you kind of need to be close to us for us to do video for you but video is huge yeah HubSpot just did they just got reports of a report that they commissioned like late last year and by like something like sixty some percent of people said like they want to receive info from businesses via video yeah that's how they want to get information they want to just look at a couple minute video to tell them what they need to know or they want to search for how-to's and things like like we do here all the time that's how they want to get information is via a video so that's that's gonna that's just gonna get bigger and I think the video you did for total health foods is a perfect example because you know they're a huge store they have a lot of things going on and within what's how long is the video oh it's uh two minutes it's under two minutes you get a I mean a huge visual and you're you're walking through the door and this is what I'm gonna see and you know if you're someone selling at they have a nice store you're you're kind of bringing the people in you know pictures worth a thousand words however you want to look at it but if you're a restaurant or anything that you want to create that ambiance of why I should be at your restaurant and for clients working remotely with us we can find someone in your area if you're in Houston and we know a person in Houston that can do the video they just need to shoot that they get it to us and we can finish all the design work and help put the plan together so it's not it's not impossible to find local contractors to help create some of that either so this is not just available to people in the Detroit you have connections everywhere we have connections and we're hoping we have more hot sauce coming so we did we got Detroit Hellfire sending us some stuff uh so we're gonna listen here for those I can hey I can handle it I just came from Mexico yeah see so we can do some of that as always thank you for watching like subscribe check out LTS creative I'll leave actually a link this time to LTS creative uh so you guys can check out what we do and if you know someone interested in getting website built contact us or any other social media marketing and all the other things related all those fun things or if you need IT services and all that yep and then next week we're going to talk well in between I'll be doing some more but we'll talk about the invoice ninja and what we did and how we imported it and the relationship we're going to build I hope with that company I'm excited about all that yeah thanks see you next week bye