 Hi everyone, thank you for joining us today at Drupalcon Portland. Today's session is going to reflect a bit on process. I, for one, am a creature of habit, particularly when it comes to food. You know, I follow recipes when I cook. I get into cycles when it comes to the types of meals I prepare. When I go out to eat, I tend to order the same thing. Once I find a meal, I enjoy at a restaurant. And, you know, I do all of this because it reduces risk in my life. There's a safety and a comfort in knowing that my meal is going to taste exactly the way I thought it was going to. However, it also prevents me from exploring new methods of cooking, entrees to serve, meals to try when I'm dining out. And any one of these things could be exponentially better than what I had originally prioritized out of familiarity. But today, you know, Drew and I really want you to step out of your comfort zone. We want you to challenge your current agency process and open yourself up to new client opportunities by starting with a simple, easily produced project rather than a huge contract deal. We want you to start small to win big. So to kick things off, we're going to do some quick introductions. We'll discuss the big project dilemma. We're going to share some benefits of small projects along with eight specific examples that you can try with your agency. And then we'll save some time at the end for Q&A and conversation. We really want this to be interactive, so we've got some Slido polls. And I will kick things off right now with one of them. So it's okay for you to pull out your cell phones right now. Go to Slido.com, hashtag 609713. Our first poll is really open-ended. You know, we're just trying to kind of like level set with the folks that are here today. Thank you for joining us again. So, you know, what kind of small projects have you leveraged to win a small account? Have you tried this before? Did it work? Did it not work? Do you have any questions about this sort of concept? We'd love to hear from you now as we're kind of warming up. The coffee's kicking in. I know I went to Starbucks this morning. Just drained a big grande myself. So, yeah, I'd love to hear from you to sort of kick things off here. Don't be shy. Or you can raise your hand also. Like, we are here in real life. Drew and I have done this virtually for DrupalCon Europe. So, if you want to raise your hand and talk to us, like, feel free to do that as well. However, you feel comfortable kind of communicating. And also just to like sanity check this. Is this working? Anybody volunteer? Like, have you tried typing something in? Yeah, did it work? Okay, Discovery. There we go. All right. Yay. Okay, Discovery worked or did not work? Look at us all participating. Ooh, SEO accessibility audits. We've got some slides coming up on there. We do. Who doesn't want to search in Google, right? Or show up in Google search. Or search in Google. A lot of people do that too. I hear. Kids are doing it. Yeah. It's popular. All right. Great. So, starting off with SLA for support prior to pitching a full rebuild. Yeah. All right. Cool. Well, I suppose I've been talking for a little bit now. Maybe I can introduce myself. I am Sarah Fruie. I am the VP of marketing at Linkia, which is an influencer marketing platform with fully managed services. I'm joining Linkia. I served in a variety of leadership roles at Pantheon, one of the sponsors here. And I also worked in ad tech and digital publishing for emerging media companies like same media, as well as heritage brands like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Hearst properties. Throughout these roles, I've worked with numerous agencies. So I've gone through many pitches. I've hired many agencies. I've worked on big projects. I've worked on small projects. So I can really bring that sort of perspective from the buyer's angle of what I've been looking for and what's helped me win bigger budgets internally to sort of fund these projects. I'm also a certified scroll master and agile marketer with marketing certifications from the Cornell Johnson School of Management. So if you want to talk agile, I'm your gal. Love it. Live it all the time. You can follow me on Twitter at Sarah Fruie. Also on LinkedIn, that's probably where I'm the most active, although if you slip into my DMs, I am very slow to respond. So just going to put that out there. When I'm not at work, you'll likely find me playing with my two young children or out on one of the gorgeous hiking trails near my home in Oakland, California. And I will pass it over to Drew. Thank you. Right. So I'm Drew, not surprisingly. I'm the head of DevRel at Neer. And I've been doing this kind of, I've been active in the Drupal space for many, many years. Before this, I actually used to work with Sarah together at Pantheon. And we spent many years together as marketing colleagues. And before that, I worked as an agency. I had an agency of myself and did that for about 15 years. And I spent my most important role really was building up the relationships, doing the sales and such. When I came over to Pantheon, I sort of saw the other side of it. So this session is very much a reflection of things that are own personal experiences, but also in my capacity at Pantheon in particular, I spent a lot of time talking with agency owners and others and founders and such, people who are doing this work. And a lot of, actually all of the things we're sharing are not our own original ideas. These are things that have come from others that we've really seen working out there in the real world. We actually are playing a number of videos as well from some agency leaders who've been trying this and just talk about their own experiences as well. And again, hopefully what we're doing today is actually equipping you with a playbook that you can go back and try next week, next month, low risk, things to just try. And actually some of the suggestions already kind of cover some of those things. So I'm gonna start with a blended agency story, right? So for many of us who run agencies or who have worked at agencies, there's like this process, there's like a mantra. It's like you must follow the process, right? And over time that process gets bigger and bigger and fancier and fancier and frankly more expensive than that. And it's a really natural thing for that to occur actually, the way I think that happens for a lot of agencies is you do a project and then you have a retro, you're like, okay, well, what didn't, right? And you like write down the things and you get better. And you go from something that used to be four steps to five to 17 to 38 with sub-bullet points and everything else. And then suddenly a bunch of years go by and it starts to feel like ruts in the road. And you realize, wait, we can't answer an email for $20,000? Wait, we can't do anything for $80,000? Wait, we can't respond to this RFP unless they have 200,000? Like whatever the numbers are, this happens over time. And you realize like, wait, there are some of these clients that are interested in us that would be an excellent match for what we do if only we could get in the door. And we're not here necessarily to say like, nuke the process, get rid of it. That's not necessarily what we're saying. But we're hoping, I'm hoping that you can take some of these and supplement and have some additional offerings, some things that will like get in there early and help you build the relationship that will then allow the marketing stakeholder on the other side to say like, look, here are our results from a $10,000 engagement. Let's do 300,000 now. It's gonna have a long-term relationship and it absolutely works. So, like that. Drew and I are gonna dance a little bit this morning. That's right, Drew. You know, we really don't wanna discredit a client because they might miss your minimum spend requirements during the discovery conversations, especially if you know that they can fund the project in the future. In marketing, we talk about this customer profile. It's like an ICP ideal customer profile. Maybe you use this internally as well, where you can kind of like build out criteria for that customer knowing that they would be able to work with you in the future and sort of fund these projects. That's gonna help you gauge if they're a long-term fit. And when you identify these folks, you don't wanna leave money on the table, right? So, dispending on the size of the organization, a lot of decision-makers, you know, I've been in middle management myself, you can sign off on a 10K budget. Like, you have that authority, but signing off on a 100K deal is a lot harder. So, you need to build a business case. And that's what helps you unlock that six-figure budget or the larger deals long-term. And, you know, again, speaking from personal experience, you know, when I want to champion a six-figure budget, it requires a strong business case, an executive sponsor, I need to get support from the C-suite. There's a lot of people involved in signing off on that budget because it's like, hey, Sarah, if I gave you $250,000 to work on the website, or I could give you that for a demand-gen program, like, where's the return on that investment for me, the CEO, the executive team? And it's a lot, it can be really difficult for a market to sort of show that value upfront where you can work with something smaller and more incremental. And so, hey, we did this little project, we saw XYZ results, our page speed got faster, we showed it better in search, we got more form fills, whatever that goal was, if I can show that finite fixed result, that I can take back to my boss and the executive team and show if we pay these people more, imagine what else it can do and come back with a larger plan. And that has worked for me in the past, and that's really what we're trying to encourage you all to think about when you are trying to win new clients. So, we've got another slide for those of you who have kind of been trickling in, we're using Slido.com, hashtag 609713. So, this one is a pull, multiple choice. How often are your minimum project costs and obstacle at landing new clients? So, are you seeing this as an issue? So, while you work on that, I have a video, maybe some of you have met Eddie at Portland DribbleCon. I have worked with him very closely in my previous role at Pantheon when I was in charge of partner marketing. Eddie's a great guy and he is the president of Colab, which is an agency, and he was reluctant to try this concept of starting small to win big. And I'd love for you to kind of hear how he overcame that as a leader. I'm hoping that he'll play. And has been growing quite significantly over the last few seconds. That's not it. The joy of multiple language, you know, tech problems. Where's that going to come back? We're going to close that. And see if we can get that. There we go. Hi, I'm Eddie and Larry, founder of Colab, a digital empowerment agency based in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States. About five years ago, someone reached out and asked if we would help with a small Dribble update to an old Dribble 6 website that had not been well maintained. And I'm not known for flat out rejecting work, but when we talked about it internally, I was like, nope, that's not what we do. We don't even really have a Dribble team. We've been largely focused on WordPress and Django based sites. And even though I knew we could handle a Dribble update, the last thing I wanted to do was enter into an engagement to work on an old busted Dribble 6 site. And I have to admit that at the time I wasn't a big Dribble fan. That's probably a really good thing to throw out at DribbleCon. Luckily, I couldn't go to the meeting where I had to say no, and someone else on my team went. And when I checked back in with her, she said, you know, we should not only do this update, but you really need to meet this client and sit down with them and get to know this person. So she's super smart. And so I did what she said. And, you know, we did the Dribble 6 updates. And I got still with the client and all he could talk about was is this possible? Is that possible? Can we build a portal for this? Can we bring payments online? Can we create something for our operations? Can we redo our entire marketing platform? And I was like, yeah, we can. So, you know, this little Dribble update that I was really reluctant to do, again, kind of opened the opportunity for someone to start to ask me those questions. Like, what is possible? What about this thing? What about that thing? And all of a sudden, you know, we've solved this person's problem, which had really been holding him back, which to us wasn't a really big deal to solve. And so then naturally they're like, well, here's the next one. Here's the next one. And, you know, that relationship has turned into tens of thousands of productive, rewarding, high-value, award-winning work. So it's a... I'm really glad I couldn't go to that meeting. Don't be shy with polls, folks. I don't know if that's working, but... Yeah, that definitely works. No, that's frequently. Oh, we do. 100% of the people in this room answered frequently. I'm sure that's exactly what just happened. Now it's here. Oh, now it's here. Okay. So yeah, again, slido.com, if you want to join the poll, talking about how minimum spend is getting in the way of winning larger projects or bigger clients that you would like to work with. So for those of you that were able to, clearly we have a winner here. It's happening a lot, right? When you think about working on smaller projects, this is really going to help you lower your barrier to entry. It's going to help build predictable revenue and create a low-risk line of business. And all of these things are going to create a more stable environment for your CFO, for your employees. There's a lot of culture around hiring freelancers and things like that when it comes to the agency world. And this can actually help you build a stable of people where you don't need to rely on freelancers as much because you have a longer... or a steady workflow and there's constant projects for people to be activated on. In our next video, Amit from XWP is going to talk about what he calls the cliff edge, you know, you have this big project and it ends, and it's like, what do you do with all these people who now all of a sudden are out of work because you're trying to land the next big deal and how he has leaned into this concept. I'm going to let Drew play this video again because he figured it out the last. I think this time it just happened. Ooh, there we go. It was interesting because we, as an organization at XWP, we had a lot of big projects. And when we started to open up to small projects, some people were a bit concerned because they said, well, that's not the type of company that we are. We do big projects. The funny thing is that big projects create a whole lot more risk to your organization and your forward planning because what happens with the big project? You get a big project, you have to have ramp up a lot of people and then there's a cliff edge and the cliff edge means that at some point that project's going to finish and all those resources are going to have to be reallocated somewhere. When we started to go from a small number of big projects to a much larger number of smaller projects and long-term engagements, we were able to forecast our business a lot better and not worry all the time about when's that cliff edge, when's that big project going to finish and all those people will be available and we have to find another big project to fill it. So the small projects actually allow you to plan much better, which is very nice. For those of you who might not have heard of XWP, they're more well-known in the WordPress space but that's advice from somebody who has, I believe somewhere between 500 and 700 people on the team. It's actually a pretty significant agency. They've had a lot of success. They do big work for all sorts of fancy brands but if they can pull off small projects and see that as a really viable strategy, I think all of us can do that as well. So we're going to cover eight specific offerings that we think people in this room can try and there are a number of common selling features and common delivery features for all eight of these. So I'm just going to cover those up front and then we'll just run through the ideas quick. So the common selling features for all of these is that there's going to be a set price, right? So oftentimes that set price is, you know, as low as $3,000 I've seen, 5, 10, 15, 20. But some specific amount of price that makes it very easy, it's kind of transactional. And it's also very easy to buy. Like you just have very few upfront interactions, like maybe you talk to someone, they have an interesting organizational sort of fit. You just say, oh, well, I don't know if you're ready for the whole thing, but here it is. And it's kind of a take it or leave it. Like we do this. A lot of people like you really like it. Let us know if you're interested. And you don't have to spend a lot of time on that. You just, you know, like it's, again, a very easy sort of conversation and a quick one. On their end, they get that and there's a clear set of requirements. In order for us to deliver this report to you, we will need access to these things for you to do a couple of other things. Just a very, like a quick little checklist. Okay, oh yeah, I can do that. I can do this. I can do that. And then also really helpful are established timelines. You do this today within two business weeks or two business, two business weeks, like all weeks are business weeks. Anyways, within two weeks, we'll get back to you with this, right? Business days or whatever. Or maybe it's a month or something like that. But just give a promise for a schedule that also really, really helps. That makes the sales cycle very quick and easy. And then on the delivery side, similarly, in order for these to work, it's really important to have a number of common features here. So they need to be easy to produce, right? So, you know, we're talking about, you know, get rid of that big process, right? Actually, the process here is really important. We're going to have it be a very detailed, all right? We're going to create a report on this sort of thing, step one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. But it's also actually a much smaller process, a much smaller set of deliverables. And if you think about something you already deliver, like as part of, you know, phase three, sub-bullet point B right now, this report that all of our clients really like, you know, like the steps for that might be this thing here, right? And so it's also a really awesome opportunity to level up team members, right? And it can be something, because it is actually pretty scripted out, junior team members can have an easy unwrap here and find some success and learn as they go. You also need to have really crisp deliverables. There can't be any ambiguity around when the thing is done, right? We're giving you a report, we're giving you a thing, like there is a deliverable. And you spell it out up front, what you're going to get, people get it, there's no back and forth, nothing like, well, we wanted to do something. No, it's very, again, very crisp on what the deliverables are. And if you can make it easy to measure and share. So one of the things Sarah was talking about was like having an SEO audit or a paid speed audit or something like that. We spent $5,000, this something improved by 10%, whatever it is that you're trying to measure. Now that changes the conversation internally from saying like, well, if you spent $5,000 and you got 10%, what if we spend $50,000? What if we spend $500,000? There are agencies who have literally had a conversation based on this approach. And then just make it easy to continue, right? So our customers like you, many of them go on to do other things, let us know if you're interested, we'll slot you into the next spot. And oftentimes that happens really easily and well. So first offering. Again, a lot of us already do this, right? But the discovery strategy workshop up front, right? We've got a lot of expertise in doing this. And a lot of us have already started breaking things down. Sell that as a thing, right? Help the clients figure out what they need. So the deliverable there is an RFP document, something that they can use to hire someone else if they don't like you or you don't like them, frankly. It's also a little lower risk for you from that perspective. And again, CRISPR deliverable, get in, get out, build a relationship, evaluate, proceed or no. That's awesome. You want to repeat that for the internet viewing audience or just the recording? All right, I'll do what I said. So there was just so many in the audience was sharing that they've done this with their agency. What was your name, ma'am? Lisa with fruition has done this and seen a lot of success. And let's actually generate, I don't know if, but just sharing this for the rest of the room because I could hear her, but that this has worked a lot for them. They've got a client with a development team, but they just keep getting lots and lots more design work because they started this pattern. Awesome, thank you. So the next one is a performance tuneup. And Amit, who you heard from earlier, I hired his agency to do this for me when I worked at Pantheon. We were struggling to get our page speeds up on the website and my team was focused on a lot of more higher priority business initiatives and we couldn't focus on that as a team. And so Amit came to me and pitched this idea of a performance tuneup, which was something that I completely bought into and was able to sell through pretty quickly. The project took about a month and we did. We achieved the goal of increasing or decreasing our page speed on the website and then continued a longer term engagement with his agency. So like case study right there of how this worked for me in a previous job. And so this is where you can kind of like look at some key pages. It does not need to be the whole website. Like what are the most valuable pages for this particular organization? Isolate those, come up with a list of things through an audit that you can improve upon and then give a budget of like it's going to take this many hours and have a very clear and fixed plan of attack for how you want to approach that situation. Yeah, question? This was just an audit. So it started with an audit and they did like a, you know, a review of my site and came back with these are the things that are wrong. If you want us to do the work, this is what we plan to do. And so there was like an initial fee up front to do the audit. And then there are actually the audit was free. Then the plan was to do the audit. And once we accomplished that, I had this business result to show how well the site had improved. And then that turned into a long-term engagement with his agency. So the main thing is having like a very clear plan of how you want to do this because that's the next thing like my boss is going to say, right? Who is, he's actually in the back of this room that I had to show in this budget for back then. But like how are you going to do this? Right? How much is it going to cost? What are we going to see? Those are the questions that any marketer is going to get from their management team to make sure that this is a positive investment. And if we spent that money elsewhere, we wouldn't achieve the same results. But I would say like make it your own. Like, so what works for you? So these are just ideas. Like again, like you can use this as a template, but if you feel like you can produce that audit quickly and actually do the work, you know, there's risk obviously with getting access to the site and other things, but do what works for you. Your mileage may vary, as I say. Security audit, similarly, right? So scan the site for potential problems. You can do a lot of the scanning remotely. It doesn't take a lot of time. Unfortunately, the sad reality is there are many security problems. People may not be aware of them, explaining what that is. A lot of that could be boilerplate text, just like, hey, here's, here, understand the dangers of cross-site scripting or whatever the things are, right? And recommend a plan to address it. And then go on to engage and do that work or not? Super important stuff there. I mean, no marketer wants to be that headline of a security breach. I can tell you that right now. So while it may seem like table stakes, this is actually mission critical for a lot of organizations. Our next offering is SEO, which can also be mission critical for a lot of organizations. Showing up on page one for search results can actually transform a business. And being on page two can really hurt your company. And so there's a lot of tools out there that you can either license, some of them are even for free, that you can look at and do SEO reports similar to the performance. Like run an audit on the site, identify areas of opportunity where you can improve the SEO results, give that over to the organization, and then have that plan of attack on how you want to improve their rankings and get to that desired goal in terms of their rank score. Another one that I didn't appreciate as much myself until I saw this in action from a number of agencies is the effectiveness of training. And so doing a paid training with an organization is actually one of the more surprising instances of this in my experience. And I think it really works because the people who are interested in trainings are often organizations that are in transition, they have either just massively increased the scope of what they're needing to manage or do or being asked for in the future, or there are a bunch of new folks coming in, or something has changed on their end and they want to get up to speed. And when you can come in and tell them all of the things and be smart and personable like you all are and demonstrate your mastery of the subject, they'll go off, they'll learn a lot, they'll appreciate that, they'll build up a relationship, they'll build up respect, hey, these people have integrity, et cetera. And then when they realize, wow, actually it's a lot of work and we thought it was kind of this big, but it's actually this big, we're gonna need help, you're gonna be at the top of the list. And again, I've seen a number of agencies do this very, very effectively. And it can be a powerful way to, again, have a very discrete engagement with someone at a relatively fixed, low-cost way that, again, leads to that big, long-term relationship. Yeah, and the other thing about this is like, you work with people that you like and a lot of folks think that that happens through business development or the salesperson that does all that relationship building and takes people out for drinks or dinner or whatever, but those trainers are the ones that have the expertise that are also going to win the hearts and minds of this client that you want to do longer-term business with. And if you can show that expertise to the people that are like boots on the ground doing the work, they're gonna be your internal champions when it comes to fighting for that budget for the bigger project. And so this is just as valuable, if not more sometimes than the BD people, not to shade on them at all, love salespeople, but the trainers can sometimes be an unsung hero, I think, in the organization. Yeah, just for folks in the back and online, she said the salespeople get you in the door, but it's these folks that maintain the relationships, which is very true. Our next offering is an accessibility audit. I feel like a few years ago, this was kind of a nice to have. A lot of folks like myself were like, I want my site to be more accessible. I don't know enough about this, but nowadays it's becoming table stakes. And for some industries, very much your requirement that you have a certain level of accessibility on the website, it's also just like the right thing to do. We want to have websites that people of all abilities can experience, and we want to build the best in class web. And so having accessibility audit, I think is a great way to improve the worldwide web that we're all using. And again, get your foot in the door. These audits tend to be free. A lot of them, you can run them and you'll get that list again, like we've been saying. I feel it's getting a little redundant, right? Like what are these things that you guys can do that we can package up really quickly and easily that aren't a burden on your organization and that you can come up with an action plan to deliver it in a finite amount of time and accessibility audits are another great way to do that. And offering seven is kind of like, sort of cheating actually. This is a lot of them all in one, right? So many of us have niche focus. You develop a niche focus in whatever it is that your agency or organization does and provides really well. And you know some interesting things about that vertical, about that market, about those clients that they uniquely value, that you have a unique perspective on. So one of the examples of this that I know that works really well is there's an agency out there in the world that does a lot of e-commerce. And their version of this is that they do an e-commerce audit at like a $3,000 to $5,000 range and it just goes through and sort of catalogs, common issues that they see and recommendations and such. And it works so well for them that that is basically all of their sales and marketing function. It brings in so many clients that lead to such big long-term engagements that they just knock out these reports, they actually do it as a loss leader. But it works incredibly well and people stay in like, whoa, I didn't, you know, like thank you, I didn't realize how bad it was. It's basically what happens. And especially with e-commerce, like if you can make, you know, improve like some of the numbers, the budget basically generates itself. Like, well, we're going to sell more stuff, therefore. But, you know, if you're working with nonprofits, like optimize their donation form, do an analysis, how many steps does it take for a donor to click through and actually donate money to this organization or learn more or whatever it is about your niche that you're serving, there's going to be stuff that you know. So, you know, find that thing or find those things and try them out. And the last one is to think about all of this continually. So Amit spoke about this a little bit earlier when we talked about that cliff edge and wanting to avoid that first company and shifting from a small number of large projects to a large number of small projects. We have another executive, Ann Stefaniek. She's the CEO and founder of Canopy Studios who you might run into at DrupalCon this week. And she has found great success with that as well. Drew is my AV specialist. Hi everybody, my name's Ann Stefaniek and I'm founder and CEO of Canopy Studios. At Canopy, we design, build and support websites for clients that want to make a positive impact. We practice what we call continuous website improvement which is the same methodology as web ops and it's the idea of taking small bites for big wins with our clients. Now at Canopy, we have two departments. One department is our build department where we do net new projects with content strategy, UX design, development, and then the other side of our business is our continuous website improvement or support. And I say support with air quotes really is offering design and development services on a monthly cadence to create impact. Now people always ask me like, how did you build such a robust support program? And the reality is that we took our time and we made some mistakes along the way. I think the one thing about support is support and these little small projects are sometimes easy to sell but hard to deliver. So one of the things that I noticed right away that in order to actually practice web ops or CWI is to create a defined process and department. It's totally different than our build processes and department because when you have these smaller micro projects you really need to be tooled to be able to handle these. We also found one of the biggest challenges that we kind of overcame was helping either new employees or folks that are joining us understanding the value of why we do support and why we do this continuous website improvement. Often a developer will come and say, oh, I don't want to work in support. That sounds boring. I don't want to do update. I want to work on net new stuff. And then when we share kind of how we actually only spend about 1% of our time doing module updates, the rest 99% of the time is actually creating impact for clients. So developers and designers can quickly and efficiently realize their work. Pretty much client has for something, we sit with the strategist and the tech lead, we come up with the scope, how we're going to execute it and then we execute it over the next three to six weeks, very successfully. So some of our larger builds that maybe go on for four or five, nine months, a developer and designer may be working on that the entire time in our CWI or our web ops department, we're really focusing on creating immediate action. Soon after an employee actually starts and works in support about eight, nine weeks in, they're like, wow, this is really fun. I get to build it, deploy it and get to the next thing. So we did find actually like helping employees with mindset shifting to really understand the value of CWI or web ops. I would also really encourage any agency owner to adopt a robust support program. I would not in the end, I would just don't understand why people don't, but I do understand that it requires some infrastructure investments and making sure that your team and your processes are really dialed for support because once again, support's easy to sell and can be hard to deliver. I would love to chat with you more about this. So if you want to reach out, give me a shout. I'm on LinkedIn, that's probably the best way to connect with me and we'll see you soon. Thanks again, bye. And I also happen to know that Ann is here. I don't know if anybody here is from Canada. Hi everybody, my name's Ann Stepanek and I'm founder and CEO of Canopy Studios. Canopy, we design, build and support web. There we go. Right, and I happen to know that Ann also is here and actually, Eddie, I saw as well. I don't see anybody in the room, but these folks are super wonderful knowledgeable people, obviously willing to share their insights and such, and so we actually have a good amount of time here for questions and conversations after we finish, but if you happen to see Ann, thank her for being willing to share her advice like this, but you might want to ask her some of these things. All right, so we have just a couple more like how to get started kinds of advice. So here we are once again with Amit and again, finding that niche is kind of his advice and focusing on value in his own words. The advice I'd give to other agencies that are looking to offer smaller projects and open that up is to just think about what is the element that you offer that is of great benefit. So put aside the thought of what revenue you can gain from it and think about what is the thing that you do that you're going to help them grow. So for XWP, for example, we found that we had a lot of experts in performance improvements, so we wanted to make sure that we were coming to organizations saying to them, this is the thing that we do. We're going to help you improve your performance and that will let you increase your revenue because your site will be faster and there will be more people coming to it. So find that one thing that you do that's great that's going to add value to your customer. Focus on that first and that will drive the business. The advice I'd give to other agencies. Clearly needed to practice that. And then one more from Eddie. And then I think we're on to questions right after that actually. There's a lot of really cool things you can do with small engagements in my experience to help open the door to some really excellent and interesting opportunities and relationships. And also, you know, every time we work with a new client, every time we get in the door with someone we shift because the more we learn about our clients, the more we learn about what they're doing that's working, what's not working, what are their challenges and opportunities, what are they disagreeing on, what are they, you know, all in agreement on, that's all things that make us better at our job. So I really crave kind of the opportunity to get inside a good company and just learn from them. And then hopefully if I did my job right we can start to take what we've learned and provide a lot of value. All right. Right, so here they are again, the eight suggested offerings that we have and again you can use these to unlock budgets, kind of break out of the rut of that huge project cycle that you might be in and realize, you know, again, like I want to get in with these organizations there's a lot of opportunity here. I know we work together well if only we could get started and yeah, Godspeed. I think there's a lot of potential here. So with that, I want to thank you all for joining us. And I also want to just thank Pantheon as well actually. So Pantheon was able to help fund our presentation here. We used to work there and certainly appreciate them for all of the years of wonderful times that we had there as well. Appreciate our sponsors. And actually, just on that note too, like if you're not familiar with Pantheon, you should go check Pantheon out because you have a booth here, if you're in this room it's highly likely that you would benefit from using Pantheon as a platform. So go check out the presentation. There's shirts too. And a party, I believe, tomorrow night. So all the good things. Okay, so questions. We have time. There's no mic here. So I guess if people just want to yell questions, we'll do our best to repeat them. Or, you know, we're back to this business and this should be open now for questions and as people type questions. If you want to, if you feel more comfortable typing the question, feel free to do that. That's great. One thing I would add to that too. So, this lady is from Square and she was talking about how they have events where they bring their customers together. They can talk about shared problems and being that connector in that relationship has endeared them to their organization and given them a sense of trust that they want to work with them in the future and created sort of a sense of community amongst people that are like-minded and have similar relationships. And I think that's one thing I would add to that that I've also seen be really successful is not only just having your customers in the same room but bringing in some prospects because your customers are going to sell you to those prospects. They did this, this and this for me and I saw so many great results and it's a lot more authentic when it's coming from that customer voice versus coming again from the sales person, which I love sales people. They pay my bills. I would not be able to do my job without them. But it's a different strategy of being that connector and creating those relationships and in any part of business I think being able to facilitate those connections isn't incredibly meaningful, so plus one to that. Yeah, that was like a new bonus now nine, right? I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. Anybody else have a question? Yeah. It is, it is available at googleslides.blblblbl I'll tweet it out. It's a very long year old. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I'll tweet it out after we finish here and I'm D. Gorton. I'll hashtag DrupalCon with it too so you don't have to search. Yeah, I can do that. The fun is either one of us on LinkedIn and we'll share it out. The question was if we would share the slides and we'll post that on our LinkedIn. Yeah, thank you for asking. Any other tips folks want to share or maybe you've tried some of these things and you're struggling to sort of execute or what's top of mind is you're thinking about what we talked about here today. Is it possible to transition a client from a small hourly project to a larger value price given the client may try to leverage your hourly formula and how? So, I I'll take a crack at this. I think one of the benefits of this approach that we're suggesting is that it is a fixed price offering. It is not a fixed hour but it only takes 7 hours to produce this, therefore, multiplied by hourly. If it takes 8 hours, by the way, you'll pay more because of this problem. Right? There's a bunch of reasons that's really good to have a fixed price but this is one of them. So if you're already out I don't know, does anybody else have I'm not coming up with an immediate suggestion like that initial offering is important to be fixed price? Has anyone struggled with this and found a way? I mean, one thing that I have seen again on the buyer side of this is having that time boxed, so you have this deliverable, it's going to cost you $5,000 we're going to get it done in a month or whatever that time frame is and be really specific. If we uncover issues that are going to extend this time frame, our billable rate is $100 an hour. If you commit to us for six months, it goes down to $80 an hour. So that's one of the ways I've seen some flexibilities. Maybe you stack that hourly rate a little bit more you cushion it and then you offer a discount to work longer term on an extended contract to give people that cost savings and an incentive to work with you longer term. Another, actually, so now having thought about it for at least three seconds. Another, if I was faced with this problem, I would probably go to the expertise of the team members involved. Like, yep we've done something small for you. It's been something that relatively younger, less experienced members of our team are able to work on. However, we're looking to do this a larger thing. We're needing to bring in more talent. It's not just developers, now it's UX people. We're bringing in a whole array of other expertise. We're providing you significantly additional value. That's why the price has gone up. I think there's someone also raising their hand to suggest. Yeah, please. I think we need to focus on the value of the time spent versus the time itself as a way to kind of transition from these fixed projects into a billable hourly rate. Absolutely. So gentlemen in the back was saying that we want to focus on these are strategic initiatives and you want to focus on the value to the larger organization. And that, I think, I don't know that we touched on this enough maybe, but having KPIs, key performance indicator, what is the result that you're going to achieve by doing a capability audit? We will have more people be able to experience our website in a meaningful way. If we do a performance audit, we're going to speed up our page load time, decrease, I keep saying speed up, decrease our page load time, which is going to increase form fills. It's going to reduce the amount of people that are going to abandon our website. It's going to extend their time on the site because they aren't going to be frustrated by that experience. So when you can start to have very clear measurable results as an outcome of this small fixed project, like me, the marketer, I can take it back to my boss and my management team. We spent this much money. We saw this result. If you give me double this, quadruple this ten times this, imagine what I can do for our business in terms of achieving our overall goals as an organization. So if you're doing something like an accessibility audit, for those of us who've worked with accessibility for a while, you can really, like the proverbial can of worms or I think that's the right metaphor. Anyways, it could be really ugly and the amount of work to do it. So I think again, thinking from this fixed risk perspective, it's smarter to deliver the audit and say, look, here are the range of problems we discovered. Some of these are probably pretty easy and if you have but again, I think it's really important to have crisp deliverables. So in the case of security or accessibility or SEO or other things like that, I think the report itself is the artifact and here you go and I know people can go run an accessibility audit themselves and click on one of the free tools and such, but interpreting that for them, helping contextualize that, giving them a report that they can then share inside internally and say like, this is what some experts we paid for some advice, the experts say we should do these things, here's likely impact of not addressing these things, can we do this or not. And then from there, you know, like, alright, hey awesome, we've started working together, it's going to be really hard for us to bid this until we get access to that thing. You can start your sales process for the bigger sort of process at that point, but you've already built trust and the relations have started and you're sort of on track to move forward. Yeah, I think that also comes down to what we talked about earlier with knowing the expertise of your organization and so if there are things that do you feel overwhelming or a little bit outside of your comfort zone, I wouldn't use that as your initial offering to get into the door but if you've done tons of accessibility audits, you've done a ton of SEO work and you feel really confident that, like, there is a quick turnaround on a small project that can result from that work, lean into that versus something that can be a little bit more audacious. And also that, like, risk reward, there is a cost in activity that you can present back to the client in a strategic method of, like, here's the results that we found, this is a lot bigger than a small project but if you don't do this work, this is what it could cost your business long term or if you do do this work, these are the benefits that you're going to see, so there's kind of two sides to the coin when it comes to that but so, like, for a lot of these, there are free tools that you can do so that's where the suggestion here is really to run those free audits and then come up with a package of the work so if it is a really big thing then, you know, maybe that's just, like, an honest conversation, there's a ton of work here, like, is this website, you know, is there a different approach to sort of saving your website at this point versus a similar project and have a real conversation with those folks in terms of the state of their business and I think that brings us to about time, at least that's my understanding of the schedule so I think we'll go ahead and close there and just say yeah, we're not going to get to that it will appendix but we appreciate you all for showing up early thank you for coming out and find us for questions yeah, and we're, again, as Sarah said, we're happy to keep talking if anybody has any questions. Have a great DrupalCon. yep