 You didn't know that, yes, I am Matthew. Yes, I am the Build Creates Marketing Director. I'm going to give you a little bit of history. I was just in a panel where people were talking about how they got into tech. I was a music major. That's useful. Music and theater. And I've been in sales for, I got into sales. Basically because theater teaches how to lie, and sales and marketing is pretty much what that job is. It's the only one that actually pays bills. So, I worked in telecommunications. So I sold phone systems and big phytropic networks around the state. And I got really bored, and I decided to go to websites. It's not as boring. And I was originally at a custom development. One of those guys. We talked really bad about WordPress for a long time. We parted ways. Bill Curry Studios was looking for someone to sell websites. And it turns out that I'm the only person that actually had that as a job. So they hired me. And when I started, my job was I was supposed to be cold calling nonprofits to sell website packages to them. That doesn't work. So that will not be one of the things that's on these slides. So when I started, they were a project only. They literally did everything in projects. They went project to project to project. And they did about $300,000. Those aren't real numbers, 3.7. It's actually pretty close. They did about $300,000 in sales every year. From the steps that we took, from the time I walked in, we have doubled. And we are planning on doubling again this year. Our goals this year are to breach $1,000,000 in sales. And the ways we did it are going to be explained here. How many of you are actually agencies? Raise your hands please. I will drop four letter words if you're offended. I'm so sorry. It's just how I talk. One of you are not agencies and businesses and thinking this is going to teach you how to do your business better. And if you're working as a sole entrepreneur, you're a freelancer, this will help you too. But if you're like, I work for Compuware, please leave as we're going to talk about things that you don't want to know about. So the first thing that we had to do, and this just sounds simple, was we had to know who we were. We had to know are we a development agency that is a designer? Are we a designing agency that's a development? Are we marketing? What the hell are we? And also what is the language that we wanted to use? It seems simple. We should go, we know who we are. We know what the kind of people that work here. It's actually taken us two years. We've gone through several iterations of our language. When we first started, when I first came on, I said, okay, well, we need to create all this content. We need to do a lot of things. This is how we're going to talk about it. We're going to use all the buzzwords. And it was a terrible flop internally. We hated it. That's just not us. We're the tough love agency. We're going to tell you how it is. We're going to, you know, we're not, we're not there to be your friend. We're there to make you money. And so we had to learn who we were around that language. And the other thing that we had to find was our thresholds. Remember when I said it, I walked into that job and I was supposed to be selling website packages. And I'm going to save a number. And I know that a lot of people that's going to see like, oh, that's a lot of money. Nobody's going to buy that. It was $10,000 to buy a website. Turns out that nobody wanted to buy those. Not because $10,000 is a lot of money. It's because that wasn't who we were. The companies, the organizations that we were working with, they weren't at that threshold, but the companies that we needed to work with were, they weren't interested in packages. We had to learn who we were and what our thresholds were. So no, we don't sell $10,000 websites. Never going to come here. It's generally about $25,000. And then, you know, it's funny, you're going to find out, any of you can find out how much a website is on our website. You can come to us and you ask the question, we're going to give you that answer. The first threshold that we had to figure out was what was our top tier. I'll give you a little story. When I came on to Build Creek, I had about 90 days to make this whole process work. The first 60 days I was doing that cold calling thing, you know, it was also writing content and doing the things. I said, hey guys, you know, this thing that I do for you guys, you know, people will pay us to do this, this inbound marketing thing, that we're getting leads and things of that nature. People will actually pay us to do this. And Eric, our owner, he was like, okay, we'll sign up for this specific software. You've got 30 days. If it doesn't work, we're going to cut ties, we're done, you can go back to Dana for your answer. Day 20, we signed a very large contract with a very large statewide company. We had to learn that top threshold. They were not a good fit. I couldn't control them, I couldn't manage them. They were too big. So you have to know where your balance is. Now, they came to us today, we've got more employees, we can do the thing, it would probably be a better fit, but that wasn't our threshold at the time. And we had to learn very quickly how to say no. And I'm going to make them say no very easy by the end of this. The second thing that we had to do was find a recurring revenue source. This doesn't have to be a huge thing. You don't have to go in and be like, we're going to charge $10,000 a month with marketing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How many of you use an outside hosting company? Please tell me you don't host in your house. Everyone uses an outside hosting company. How many of you are charging your clients to host their website, a monthly recurring fee of some kind? Do you have maintenance built into that? Yeah, if you don't have maintenance, when I walked in they said, well, how do you guys use hosting? Well, we'll help them sign up for all of them, get all the stuff set up on Liquid Web or whatever on the servers that we, the server environment we want to work in, but we don't want to charge them, we don't want anything to do with hosting. Well, there's a lot of great partners that are downstairs that can create a structure for you to make money off of the hosting and off of the maintenance. Maintenance doesn't take that long. You built the website well, it's not going to take that much, you can charge people, and now you have a monthly, just a small revenue stream that you can grow on. Because what I'm going to try to work everyone through is you can't scale your company if you don't have a scalable amount of money coming in every month. If you're going from project to project, you may have a banger first quarter, oh my god, I got a higher tune, I got a higher tune developers, I got to do all this stuff. The next quarter it takes a dip, and that was literally the ebb and flow that our company had every single year was they did this all year long, and I'm like, and they had great years, they had big time years, but they didn't have monthly recurring revenues to allow us to make it all for a trajectory. Less than 10% of our monthly revenues in 2015 10% of our revenues every month were monthly revenues. By 2017 it was about half, and that's kind of the threshold that we wanted to keep it. I want to keep it about half of the money that's coming in is coming from existing client bases. And the thing that it did for our owners, he gets to sleep now, he gets to rest, he knows his bills are paid, his rent is paid, the lights are on, all of his employees are taken care of, he doesn't have to worry about payroll. These things are done, they're not, and they don't, they're not going anywhere. These people are locked into agreements, they're locked into contracts so that we can scale. And to kind of give you an example, when I started we had about one and a half full-time employees, maybe two full-time employees and a couple of contractors, but we just signed a new lease to move out of town because we can't find space big enough because we have six, seven full-time employees that we're going on, and we're hiring, by the way, if anyone's in marketing, you can come see me afterward. We're looking for another marketer, but I need another meeting so I can take a vacation. So the steps to doing it were to create content, to write. Sorry, this is not a good talk for you. You need to write. When we do an about campaign, we generally tell people you should be creating at least two to three pieces of content every single day. Or I'm sorry, not every single day, every single week. We do about one piece of content to two pieces of content every single day, internally. We literally are, there's somebody writing every single day. And yes, it's good for SEO, but the second thing is that we can use it for, because we're strategic on how we write, as we can reuse that content to nurture our leads, to working down the sales funnel, to have email circle campaigns, and I'm sure some of you in this room get all the time. We get to use that content to continue to nurture leads. And they may be bad leads, but we don't have to worry about it and take care of it. And we get to be that change that we seek. We want to tell people, hey, you should be doing this, you should be paying us to do this, but we have to be the first one to do it. We have to show people that this is what you should be doing, this is how it works. And we have the case studies, including ourselves, that say, yeah, this works and we're set. And our leads went from like about two to four contact forms a month to we get about six leads a week. Now not all of them are qualified. And in the next steps we're going to figure out how we get, how we filter those people out. Those leads are coming from what are called gated content. So we have all that content. You take the best of it and you put it behind a pay wall. Just give me your who you are. Tell me who you are. And we will sell you all the data you want to know. And can anyone tell me what the first question anyone ever asks you when they want to talk about building a website? Anybody? How much does it cost? How many of you are afraid to tell us about how much your website costs? Why? Do you know how much your competitors charge for a website? So they know how much you charge, right? But below the threshold if you tell them hey this website costs this much and they're below the threshold you don't have to deal with it. You can have email marketing do the thing because if they're really passionate about what they want and they're like man I can only four or five thousand or two thousand or a thousand dollars but it costs for you a thousand, you know twice that. If they really want to work with you they really want to, they'll find the money. If they're passionate about their business and this is serious for them so if you continue to nurture them through automations, you know workflows, things of that nature you personally as the business owner don't have to do jack. Just let it go and if they're happy if they want what you have they're going to come back which is what we're talking about remarketing to them and there's two ways to remarket at least for me one is the email marketing what I'm talking about the second thing is many of you are not using Google AdWords remarketing for your business you should do that now and I'm going to let you in on a secret it's super damn cheap really cheap we set a budget of about two dollars a day and it never maps out our budget AdWords costs can be a couple thousand dollars a month for search ads our remarketing ads costs us virtually nothing the point is that it's a brand it's remarketing it's a brand reinforcer every time you go to another website you see that military ad and I get people all the time that complain we do you please lay off I can't go to a website where I see your stupid green ads no that means I win you see my brand tough and this information can nurture those leads they really really want what you've got they're going to find a way to get the money to do it and we've already talked about automation and I'm going to dig into that a little bit deeper down the road oh right now WordPress is fantastic it's for the most part free but find some tools that are going to make you money that's that first step find that first residual money that you can help okay so it sounds bad it's like oh it's $100 a month what's that you build 12 websites in a year that's $1200 it's recurring you do that the next year it's $2400 a month this is recurring revenue that you can use to pay for a part-time developer to do your quarterly maintenance and you're still making money it's profit and then find good marketing tools because I don't know I kind of skipped over the point by the way SEO, PPC in battle marketing this is not that hard I literally taught myself my job by watching YouTube videos that's it took a little while spent a lot of time doing it this isn't rocket science if you can build and develop a website you can do SEO it's just not that hard and the beautiful part about WordPress is that it gives you so many great tools already kind of baked in Yoast being one of them and not plugging them because they're sponsored but seriously plugging them because they're sponsored they're for ongoing SEO it's super it's free and you get to learn some of those at least know the characters that you should okay where are my keywords they give it to you if you're coming from a custom side they don't have those tools you just got to know the information and that's where I think a lot of the people got this idea that search engine optimization is rocket science now I'm going to tell every client I'm glad there's no businesses in here that it really is rocket science but it's not and any if you are a single I just do this by myself I hope websites for small businesses if you can build that website you can optimize it and help them in marketing and what are some of the tools that we use number one is the reason I'm going to say it's a great tool is it makes you money again hopefully no businesses in here they have a model that allows us to charge more than what we pay for it so for a small business who's just getting started you take in speclet it gives you about five I think it's ten licenses and it's $79 a month look up this web it is a screen captures every visitor so you get to see how people are interacting with their website does heat mapping, does click mapping these are not only powerful tools for your user experience and your marketing elements there are also super cool tools to take into a sales meeting and go look at the cool we do how many of you have the other people that are giving proposals to give you all this information and data and so at $79 we charge our clients $79 a piece you get through five or ten of them you're making free money off of everybody else that profit is necessary because $790 a month or whatever is part of a payroll for another content writer now we can scale we can take on more clients we can make more money on Moz this doesn't make you money in that you can charge it for this but they're going to help you be really efficient on correcting your websites and making them as optimized for search engines as possible they're constantly croaking checking your website data they're doing all the things they're giving all these insights and the last one is Sharpsford this is actually a tool that kind of took us to the next level the thing that I had 30 days to prove that this works and I'm here talking to you now so obviously it did and it's an agency I don't know if you're familiar with HubSpot it's a big buzzword they charge a ton of money Sharpsford is a competitor in HubSpot and what it's basis is is that we are four agencies our pricing model is four agencies we want to help agencies grow we want the same functionality as Marketo part of HubSpot but about a tenth of the cost and they sell you you charge what you want we don't care so you can and anyone who wants a demo of this if you're interested in something like this you can see me afterward and I'll get you a demo from Sharpsford and I'll give the referral and send it off to our account rep and they'll give you a demo of the software help you understand the pricing model I won't really go into that but it's an incredibly aggressive pricing model to help agencies because once you for us once we've locked our clients into we give them so much data they know who visits they know when they visit they know their page they visit they know all this information and it's got marketing automation tools, email tools and one of the more important things for business owners is where my marketing dollars get spent marketing attribution and this tool gave us marketing attribution it says are you familiar with John Wonke he was a he was like a magnate in retail in the turn of the century he said half my advertising dollars are wasted, promise I don't know which half what some of these tools that are going to help you as a business and then also help you grow as a business because you can resell this to other people is that you get to tell them this is where your marketing dollars work and oh by the way if they're all coming from organic leads guess who's good look at what we did for you you should stay working with us and pay us more money so kind of wrap things up in conclusion if you don't know who you are then how can your customers ever know who you are and how are they going to know that they're a good fit for you and you for them and if you're living project to project how can you grow safely it's really hard anyone asking anybody who's been doing this for 6, 8, 10 years growing organically is very, very difficult without some sort of safety mechanism in the terms of monthly recurring revenues and if I can't stress this enough create content it's got so much value and then answer the questions that you have and filter out those that aren't qualified not everybody's a good fit for Bill Great Studios we know it of those 6 1 maybe a week is qualified enough to even get to the proposal level we filter out 5 of our leads it's not a good fit it's our they take the pricing and sell it out but then there are some that will come back 6 months later we know every page they visit and every time they visit they became a better they became the right fit and because we nurtured them we remarketed to them we did all those things and then when they found the money they were like oh this is a good fit now and then find the tools that aren't costing money none of the inspectors are free none of these tools are free but they make you money it's an investment not an expenditure and take a look at the tools take a look at the tools that you have and make sure they are making you money and that is how we are getting bigger any questions do you have a development side? can you charge the client package to mine separately? yep so the question was we have a development side we have a marketing side do we charge the answers yes do we sometimes split them out the answers yes we are going to do the thing that is going to fit the client the best a lot of clients are like I have this in my marketing budget and I am on a recurring basis and we want the two separate and then there are some that go roll it all into one X amount of dollars 15,000 a month or whatever roll it all into one and we have an annual contract to get that website one more question what is the difference between inspectors and there is a big difference Google Analytics tells you where they came from and Specklet says let's watch a video of that person doing that activity yeah so with the combination of start spring and in Specklet we can take your email address your IP address, tie them together, go to inspectlet and watch Declan go through our website and go page to page to page and just be totally creepy and you're looking at your traffic is there any tool that says on Sunday I might spike I might spike and wonder where does this traffic come from it happens a lot is there a way that you can figure out what caused that spike if you don't have those well do you have Google Analytics on the website do you have Google Analytics on the website I got Google Analytics yes it should tell you where that spike came from you should be able to and you say you see the spike and you go through the channels and you narrow it down and say Tuesday we got this spike with an extra 100 visitors than we normally have and then you narrow it down to Tuesday in Google Analytics and you say it will break down where that traffic came from and you can go oh it all came from Facebook from the day you set up Google Analytics it's tracking that data yeah yes sir did you find when you were at we saw in the postage that you could fit further for like email support email is terrible if someone wants email support it's 150 bucks an hour and we can help you as much as we can but generally we just direct them over to whoever the email hosting company is yeah and by the way when you say it's 150 bucks an hour for us to trouble to shoot this for you they generally will go get the free support from their email hosting yeah I guess at what point did you start subcontracting and you know just hired employees and did you still self contract okay so that depends on which side the development side we don't generally we'll do like a subcontract to hire kind of thing you got 90 days and if you're not an idiot we'll hire you also can you pass the drug test if you tell us yes we're definitely not going to hire you we don't hire losers but yeah it's it's our hiring process literally we'll generally subcontract a whole lot in terms of development most of our subcontractors come out of their writers we do subcontract some writing just because they mount that we write when you've got you know dozens of clients and websites and stuff that they gotta write where we literally can't handle it but if you're a marketer if you can write you can give me your resume it's fine that's what we're looking for another marketer that's my next question about writing so when you you said write write write on that slide so when you do all this writing is it around who you are or what you guys have done in terms of who you are and then and then when it comes to these content writers are because you might have a few of them don't look back in the class you might look forward are the different writers do you guys make like do they break different voices that are the core of who you are and you suggest that you hire a writer who doesn't write on our sales if you're that depends should you hire someone versus internal I think that external writers do a great job of explaining it to people who don't know like your customer base your customers like our we have people who write for us that they don't know anything about IT services but you know what a lot of servers are visitors they come to the website so it's a really big thing you know if you have just IT people talking about it they're talking a bunch of jargon that who the hell knows what that means so you're asking about write write write this is isopic art I'm not a designer this is a funnel this is our top of the funnel middle of the funnel I also have this handwritten to someone with cerebral palsy and that's the bottom of the funnel I hope I didn't really defend it I'm such an asshole you take all and then you have your personas this is person one, person two person three each of them have different questions based on who they are and where they are on the sales funnel sales and marketing funnel and back to your client what are the questions or if you are writing for yourself what are the questions that everyone's asking if they're a marketing person because your web design agency who's coming to you business owners marketing people occasionally the IT guys have got stuff to do with this job and they all have different questions based on who they are they all have different questions based on where they are in their entire process when they're at the top of the funnel that's why we have a pricing guide you're just starting to glaze through all this jazz the first thing you're like alright well I've got 5 grand for my business the owner to build a website I gotta come in here I gotta find out who's gonna I'm gonna chop off the people that I came for and I'm just going how much does a website cost and I go to a bunch of web designers and go oh okay these are the prices we have another thing that's called a marketing or a website buying guide and that's in the middle of the funnel that goes what's your process like cause that's usually the next question what does this all what happens your bottom of the funnel contact which is they filled out a contact form they actually said okay I can afford you your process is clean and clear I know what I'm gonna be going through alright I'm ready to talk to you and here's my budget give them some ranges ask them what their budget is cause people will tell you that they don't have a budget return it already it's gonna be the longest damn process of your life it's gonna be so long it's because they have to figure out where they're gonna find the money and find out how much it costs to do this so ask them their budget and the ones that say that it's undetermined you can kind of like skim around with you cause I'm not really sure you're serious someone who's ready to buy and how much money they can spend you don't go into car yeah you don't go buy a car but you know how much money you've got so of course at the bottom of the funnel ask how much money it costs and then the other content that you're writing is gonna be nurturing those leads in those different areas of the funnel they came in from the top of the funnel those other questions that are asked along that process answer those write blogs about them and then re-market that back um what development firms handle what oh sorry Mark your first how do you handle like potential competitive conflicts so you mentioned like IC services would you take another IC services company in the same space tell them we're loyal to those people we get people who ask us to do because they see it on our portfolio that you do this so they go oh now if they're we don't have an ongoing project that's one thing but if you're bought a website and if you're marketing yeah because the marketing are twice as much as the website is we build a website for you know we'll call it 20 grand by the time they're three years into their marketing they spend $100,000 marketing is way more valuable I don't want to ever miss that one I have a question kind of related to email you're recommending those two companies are you recommending other solutions for email or like how do you handle that I personally don't care but no I think we should that's asking Ian I think we usually say go use Google apps or someone like that basically because it's got the cleanest integration with some of the softwares that we use for tracking your email basically and it's super easy to put together it's cheap and it's cool I always panic when somebody wants to they're willing to move a website to the hosting that I recommend something cheap and crappy but then they have like an integrated email and they're probably not touching that I mean Google apps are even Office 365 are so easy to set up it's like I don't know why you didn't want to stick with that webmail plan but I don't know that's why they're always good to work and Gmail's five bucks are pretty easy I mean yeah if you don't have $5 to invest in a proper email service you're probably not a good fit to rebuild your website right I don't know anybody else do you guys have a warranty or a guarantee do you offer that to your client or to your customer in which case in terms of marketing do you develop a form or a warranty or a guarantee if they're not happy I will say from the website side I don't really have a warranty we have a 90 days fix whatever is broken we'll make revisions and things of that nature you're signing off on the website launch you're not going to break in 90 days in terms of marketing here's my warranty you give me 12 months if this costs you more than it made you you don't have to do this again and if you because it takes a good 12 months to really see a good return on investment someone's like well I'll do 90 days and it's not doing them work that's not how this works SEO doesn't work that way it's not let's optimize the page if you give me 12 months and it didn't make you money don't sign up again I've never had someone not sign up so but it's you're willing to we can show you that this works for everybody else this is work for other people so 12 month contract there's your warranty so do you target an armor or Michigan or I'll target anybody that's got an open checkbook check clears we target an armor in Michigan Michigan web design things like that if you're asking what keywords do we target I can't tell you that no of course I'm not competitive no it's fine and honestly if you use SEM you can find out what keywords I'm targeting it tracks all that information already I know what all my competitors are so you're customers are Michigan or I'm Michigan primarily we work primary I mean most of our work comes from the Ann Arbor Detroit area but you know we certainly apply it to other parts of the state anything else? alright cool that was fun