economy

View on separate page

Transcript

Brad Morrison:

If something is working, right? Because you know because you have the data, I don’t think it’s a good idea to pull back right now. I don’t. In fact, I think if you’re paying for ads, things are probably going to get cheaper. There’s going to be less competition. Your competitors are probably just looking at the line item in the budget and they’re trying to save that money and maybe saving in the wrong places. So I think this is the time to double down on things that are working. If you need to cut spend, if you need to cut your expenses, then sure, you have to look across everything, but this isn’t where I start.

Joe:

With everything happening during the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic recession, it’s easy to panic, cut costs and coast until all of this blows over, but that can kill your business. Instead, we need to adapt. And in today’s episode, Brad Morrison tells us what his agency is doing to work through what will seemingly be a tough economy at least for the next few months. We talk about our experiences with the last recession, what’s different, and what you can do to adapt. There are a lot of great takeaways here and it’s not just spend less money. It might – spoiler alert – might be the opposite of that. So sit back, relax, and let’s get into that interview right now.

Joe:

Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, how did you build that? Today, my guest is Brad Morrison. He is the Chief Happiness Officer at GoWP. I am very excited to welcome him onto the show. Brad, how are you?

Brad Morrison:

I am doing well, Joe. Thank you so much for having me on.

Joe:

My pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Brad and I have known each other for a couple of years now. I forget if we met at CaboPress or we met before that and we just became more friendly throughout. We met at some WordCamp.

Brad Morrison:

WordCamp U.S., I think. I think it was WordCamp U.S. a couple of years ago, yeah.

Joe:

Yes, that is exactly right. If I recall correctly, because I always remember when someone compliments me, I think you had very kind words to say about my work.

Brad Morrison:

Absolutely.

Joe:

I’m bringing that up because I never know how to handle that. I’m just like, “Thanks,” and then like… I don’t know. I get very awkward, and that’s the only time I ever get awkward.

Brad Morrison:

Yeah, I know. I’ve always been impressed with what you do. You’ve put so much good stuff out there for the WordPress community. Yeah, that was one of those moments. You know how you have these moments where you meet someone that you already know about, you already know of them and other people know of them. So that was kind of a cool thing, and it’s only been better that we’ve gotten to know each other better over the last couple of years.

Joe:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you guys are doing the same thing over at GoWP. The Virtual Happiness Hour that you’re having right now is super cool. I wish I could attend more of them, but my wife usually works on Fridays, and so that’s like right at the end of nap time for me.

Brad Morrison:

You made it through it the other day. And I tell you, I’ve been working on my lighting. For those that don’t know, we had Joe and Shawn Hesketh and Chris Lema on. They were talking about your kind of set up for audio visual. That was really cool because I’ve realized all the things that I’m doing very poorly. So I’ve tried to make up for some of that, but yeah.

Joe:

Yeah. And lighting is one that is often forgotten about by a lot of people. If they know something, they’ll know they need the microphone, maybe they want to upgrade their camera, but lighting is something that… Because it takes a lot of setup, and I’ve got a box light off camera here that just takes up a lot of space that I’m happy to have it, but getting that three-point lighting is a challenge.

Brad Morrison:

That was one of my biggest takeaways was when… Because my camera, I’m just using a regular webcam, like the Logitech C920 and it’s always been a bit grainy, but it was cool to hear all of you say, “Don’t go out and spend a lot of money on a camera right now, work on the lighting first.” And that has made, it’s not perfect, but it’s made a lot of difference. Again, it’s funny how everything’s sold out right now, right?

Joe:

Yeah.

Brad Morrison:

So like the Elgato Key Light, I tried to get that, that was a recommendation. Right now, I just having a lamp on my desk. But the lighting, just having more light actually helps.

Joe:

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s like, for those of you listening who can’t quite visualize what we’re talking about here, take a picture with your phone in low light versus like bright light, and it’s going to be a lot better because the camera doesn’t have to work that much harder or harder at all to capture the element that you’re trying to take a picture of. And so that’s why lighting, it is maybe even more important than going out and buying like a DSLR to be your webcam, because now your C920, which is a very popular HD webcam, doesn’t have to work as hard to get a clear picture of you, so it’s less grainy. And I can tell that on this call actually that you do look less grainy from the-

Brad Morrison:

Less coarse, yeah.

Joe:

Yeah.

Brad Morrison:

Awesome. That’s good to know there. So, yeah.

Joe:

Yeah, absolutely. So we fell into a little bit of a trap here and now we started talking about gear, and I love gear, but that’s not really what we’re talking about today, though we can definitely talk more about that. We’re talking about how GoWP is working through the pandemic, the economic effects of the pandemic and the likely recession that we will officially be in once the numbers come in and what other small businesses can do as well. So Brad, why don’t we start out with a little bit about who you are and the history of GoWP because the earliest iteration of GoWP lived through the last recession. Is that right?

Brad Morrison:

Yes, that’s right. Yeah, in 2004, I kind of started out on my own really as a freelancer, a contractor, and at that time I was really doing a lot of different things. I would do networking, I would lay cable and do IT work. I mean, anything that I could bill for, right? And so just the hourly model, and I would do hardware, set up computers and servers for local businesses, but then I would also create their website. And about a year of doing that, of straddling both, I kind of had to make a choice on which do I want to pursue as a business and focus on. And so I guess that’s the first time I kind of niched down and said, “Okay, we’re going to do all things web.”

Brad Morrison:

At that time, WordPress was a great blogging platform. It was only a couple of years old, you know? And so we didn’t really build sites with WordPress at that time. We were building sites at first in Mambo, which became Joomla. And then, so if we spent about four to five years of building Joomla websites and then some other open-source systems, we would use I think OpenCart, we would use as a real estate platform that we used, Moodle for online courses. So we really did a lot of just helping businesses, schools, nonprofits, kind of wrangle nonprofit… I mean, open source software and pull that together so that they could kind of thrive with it.

Brad Morrison:

WordPress started getting a lot better 2008, 2009, and specifically someone like me, who’s not a developer, just going in and creating menus, that was not easy before WordPress 2.8 maybe. And so then jumping into that to be able to quickly create a website that could really be a full fledged CMS is kind of when we kind of changed to WordPress. But it was an interesting time because back during the first recession, and that’s kind of with what we’re talking about here and even how that relates to what we’re dealing with now, I felt that it was almost a once in a generation type thing. I’ll say that not the badness of the recession, right? The fact that businesses, a lot of local, small, medium sized businesses had really held out and not gone, really embrace the web in the way that they do now. And so what the recession did was say, “Why am I spending $20,000 a month on billboards when there’s such a big audience online?” And so it was a way for them to save money but have their dollar go a lot further and reach more eyeballs with online.

Brad Morrison:

And so we thrived. As a full service agency, we thrived during the first recession. I was in different groups at the time and it was a little bit disconcerting. You be around, sitting with a table of home builders and retail and jewelry store, and they were struggling. They’re like, “Business is cut in half. We don’t know if we’re going to keep the doors open. We don’t have any construction projects.” And it’s like, yeah, we’re kind of growing a lot right now. Things are pretty good, but it was just being fortunate with the timing, I think.

Joe:

It’s so funny… not funny. It’s interesting that you say that because I distinctly remember. I was in grad school and I had been freelancing since high school. I had been using WordPress basically on all my clients’ sites since 2006 when they rolled out pages and I was pretty glib and I was saying things like, “What recession? I have so much work to do right now,” because you’re right, we picked the right field to be in at that time. A lot of businesses were like, “Oh man, I need to move online.” Just like what we’re seeing now, a lot of businesses are like, “we need an eCommerce website like right now, and it’s easier than ever to build an eCommerce website.

Joe:

So it’s really interesting you mentioned that because I wasn’t sure really if that was just like a personal experience or it was just because I was in grad school and so my overhead wasn’t nearly as big as another person’s overhead in the same field, but we definitely have a very similar experience that way.

Brad Morrison:

Yeah. And I think it might be different if you’re like an agency that deals with big national and international accounts. That might be different. If you’re getting $100,000, $500,000 from a client annually or more than that, even millions of dollars, maybe they felt that, but I do think most people that work on just normal, whatever, $5,000 to $20,000 websites that manage PPC campaigns, that handle SEO, that do a lot of the just digital marketing basics, my experience in our midsize city… I was in Savannah, Georgia at the time. I live right outside of Atlanta now, which is larger, but my experience in the midsize city is that most freelancers and small agencies were doing really well. It was, like I said, I think just a massive change in the way that small businesses were spending their money.

Brad Morrison:

And so yeah, that was cool. The business went from being me to in two or three years having multiple staff members and having a nice office downtown and just growing. We were really growing as an agency. So we had about 10 full-time and part-time staff that would come in to the office and work with clients and project managers, designers, web developers. So that was cool. So like I said, that kickstarted or jumped started our business in a lot of ways and allowed me to go from a freelancer to owning a full service agency.

Brad Morrison:

In 2014, it was really a year before that, we were starting to feel a little bit okay. I mean, Joe, we had at one time, I remember, 90 different projects, some of them tiny, right? But some of them larger, 90 different projects at some stage of trying to be completed. From signing a contract to we’re waiting on content for the client, we’re waiting on content for the client to we’re in this weird black hole stage, this punch list stage where a site is finished, but it’s not finished, right? We’re still hearing like, “Okay, well, this isn’t quite right. Can you change that? Can you do…?”

Brad Morrison:

I think because of that, with a smaller staff, we just became exhausted. Growth is good, but managed growth and controlled growth is a lot better. And so I think we all kind of got to a point where it’s like, how can we simplify this and make things run more predictably. Predictable cashflow, that’s obviously important so you’re not going out and chasing projects, but also how can the workload be more predictable and sustainable? And so that’s when we started envisioning what are we best, let’s build a service around maintenance and support at the time and hosting. We also provided some hosting just locally, certainly not on a large scale level, but with our local clients we had hosting. So we had a few recurring products… productized services, I should say, and we kind of reimagined the business around that and we cut out things and we rebranded as GoWP, but that’s kind of how we became GoWP and we haven’t looked back since.

Brad Morrison:

So that was 2014 and things are going well, and then all of a sudden you have another kind of a global crisis with the pandemic, and that has definitely changed the way we approach our business now, but it’s a new time in a lot of ways. I think some of the benefits of having a lot of people not spending money back in the first recession, a lot of people over the last 12 years, they’ve kind of made that change. And so there’s not a lot of new money coming in from traditional advertising, so I think the way we approach it needs to be a little bit different.

Joe:

This episode is sponsored by CircleCI. Whether you’re on a development team, manage a development team yourself, or you have a business that relies on working software, a good process is so important to making sure you’re creating high quality work. Continuous integration or the ability to check and manage code automatically can help you and your developers streamline the process in a big way, and CircleCI is here to help.

Joe:

Designed for modern software teams, CircleCI’s continuous integration and delivery platform helps developers push code with confidence. Trusted by thousands of companies from four-person startups to Fortune 500 businesses, CircleCI helps teams take their software from idea to delivery quickly, safely, and at scale. Visit howibuilt.it/circleci to learn why high performing DevOps teams use CircleCI to automate and accelerate their continuous integration and delivery pipelines. As someone who’s worked on big coding projects for big companies with distributed development teams, I can tell you that continuous integration tools have helped us make sure we deliver working code to our clients. It helps instill trust in our team, and it lets our team focus on solving new problems instead of dealing with the same ones over and over again.

Joe:

So once again, learn how CircleCI can help you end your business at howibuilt.it/circleci. As a special bonus for How I Built It listeners, CircleCI is having a virtual raffle where you can win a pair of the newest Sony noise canceling headphones, improve your team’s processes, and enter for a chance to win and howibuilt.it/circleci. That’s C-I-R-C-L-E-C-I. And now, back to the show.

Joe:

What you said about kind of more predictable cashflow and workflow, that has been like one of the mainstays of this season and what we’ve talked about over the course of the podcast. We’ve had Brian Cassel on talking about productized services and Jason Resnick, and I think that’s really important because when you get to a time like this, a lot of people who didn’t have a business through the last recession, or maybe weren’t even working in the last recession, the last recession was like 12 years ago, which is, above average, four times between recessions.

Joe:

So things have been really good for a lot of people for the last 12 years, so maybe we don’t necessarily have that mindset and that preparedness. People tend to think the good times are going to last forever, but having a… I’m dancing around the question. How has that predictable cashflow and workflow, those productized services, how have they helped you in the first few months of the recession? And just to timestamp this because it’s a very contemporary episode if someone is listening to this like two years from now, we’re recording this at the end of May 2020. A lot of the United States is still under, say home orders from the COVID-19 pandemic. So we are two months and change into when most of the stay at home orders have started for the United States. Things are just starting to open up in certain areas of the country, but businesses have been greatly affected, especially those in-person businesses that require people being wherever they are. So how has your predictability kind of helped mitigate this current recession?

Brad Morrison:

Yeah, great question. Again, we had five years of really every month being a little bit better, not always a ton better, but a little bit better than the month before because, like you said, times were good and you don’t question that, you just say, “Hey, this is really working. Let’s keep doing what we’re doing.” And then the pandemic happens and you really have to make sure that you analyze things that it’s not the same. Maybe you normally have a little bit of dip going into the summer, now you have the pandemic on top of that, where people are pulling back on expenses, and so it’s like, all right, that’s a new challenge that compounds the normal issue.

Brad Morrison:

So for us, I will say this, cashflow, that’s number one, always. We’re always looking at. You want us a business that is solvent. You want to make sure that you can keep paying your employees, that you can keep serving your customers, and that you have a solvent business. You need to stay in business, right? I will say in normal times, most of the time, that is our number one, that’s the priority that we have. I did change that a little bit in the first few weeks of this and it was about the people. I was really concerned about my staff, and I should say staff and customers, but staff first because we have to be able… This is a health issue. This is something where just to make sure people are physically safe, they’re mentally safe, and that we prioritize that above everything else. And so we did that.

Brad Morrison:

I changed the way that we have our daily meetings, so that we first kind of just talk about how is everyone doing and open the door so that if someone needed to have a more in-depth conversation about something, then I’m available for that. But it was really, as the Chief Happiness Officer of GoWP, as the CEO, I wanted to make sure that my staff understood that I cared first and foremost about their health. So that was one, and that’s different. That’s not something, from a health standpoint, you necessarily have to think about. Our people are always important, but having that type of conversation and leading with that is a little bit different. So that was one.

Brad Morrison:

Number two, our customers, how is your business doing? Forget about cashflow impact on GoWP right now, let’s just make sure that we are helping our customers and the resource that our customers need right now during this time. And what that meant for us was let’s put some things together that they can share with their clients to let them know of everything that they have to worry about right now. They’re in clients, the things that we’re taking care of for that agency, they don’t have to worry about that. And so just getting that together was kind of the first thing we did during this.

Brad Morrison:

The second thing then goes to, it’s what I call like sometimes you got to plug the holes. If there’s a cashflow leak, if there is a problem, you got to make sure that things are stable. And so that’s what we did. We did lose some customers in the first couple of weeks of this. There was a lot of anxiety. And remember, our customers, we are a purely white label business. So we don’t necessarily have direct customers that come to us and sign up direct businesses. The businesses and the sites that we maintain, the pages that we build, everything we do, it comes through our agency client. And so for us, it’s about giving them the resources so that they can share and say, “We’ve got things taken care of.” But they can’t predict what cancellations they’re going to get. So we didn’t really lose customers, but we lost subscriptions from existing customers. So again-

Joe:

Got you. Right.

Brad Morrison:

That makes it a little bit challenging, but it’s, how can we support our agencies? So as long as we’re doing that, that helps. And so what we’ve seen after the first couple of weeks, we saw that it stabilized, the cancellations were less and less. The ones that were hit hard had to go. There were a number of an agency that just serves vacation rental properties. And so that’s a tough niche to be in during this. And so they had a lot of cancellations. We saw it with some restaurants, we saw it with the businesses that you would think would be impacted by this hard. We saw cancellations across those. But then things started to stabilize and we’ve seen existing customers actually lean on us more, which has been really cool. So they’ve added subscriptions.

Brad Morrison:

The leads did drop off. New prospect leads, they dropped off pretty heavy at the beginning. We’re starting to see that come back a bit, which is good. But from a cashflow standpoint, I’m thinking about money coming into the business, money coming out of the business, and what can I do as a leader to figure that out and mitigate those problems. I guess that now is number two. So the people, then dealing with cashflow, number two.

Brad Morrison:

And then for me, I look for the opportunity in something like this, and so is there an opportunity that you might not have had, but now, because conditions have changed, what can you do? And sometimes that’s looking at your own business and saying, these are some things that we can cut out. These are some things that we’ve offered and spent some money on, but it hasn’t really gained traction. It’s not something that we want to continue doing. So let’s look at ourselves and see if we can cut things out, or if we can recognize… Zoom is probably the perfect example of right timing. You talk about an opportunity, look at Zoom and Amazon right now that are able to thrive during this time because people’s habits have changed. So we’ve been looking at a lot of that too, like what do we need to do to be able to adapt to the now, and then what things might look like a year from now?

Joe:

Yeah. First of all, thank you for that very thorough answer. I think that that covers a lot of really good ground. You mentioned taking care of your staff. I’ve heard from a lot of other podcasts and things, it’s like, how are you? Then it’s like, how are you really? That’s the question that’s being asked? And then your customers too, serving your customers. I still host a few… I don’t do a lot of freelance web development work. I do enough to keep my hands dirty while I make courses on how to do it, but I do still have several clients that I host and I messaged all the ones that had bills coming due and I said, “Hey, if you need a little extra time, I can float you if you need it.” Especially like one of my clients has a dance studio. She has been closed for a few months. So I don’t know what she’s doing, but I was like, “If this extra money is going to help you, then that’s okay, don’t worry about it for now.”

Joe:

So definitely take care of your customers. I think that in the same vein that you were saying, I’ve been trying to be generous with my time and help people because people will remember that. I don’t know if you know Pam Aungst. She’s been on the show, she’s an SEO person, but she said that she did this exact thing in ’08, ’09. She helped people and was generous, and then they remembered that in the good times when they could hire her. And I’m not saying do it because people will hire you when they have money, but people remember generosity. So look for opportunities to help people, look for opportunities to build your business like you’re saying. I think those are all really great things.

Brad Morrison:

Yeah. That’s something that we have tried to even… That’s a core value of ours, by the way, is we help and encourage others, and ingraining that in your business is huge, and it’s not because of the payoff, not because of the money. Like you said, you’re doing it because people remember that and you kind of grow by pulling everyone else up, right? That’s how you lead and grow, and it’s a great thing. I think it’s going to be interesting because I think more people and more businesses, and especially in the freelancer and agency space, I’m seeing so much of that, which is awesome. They’re helping each other, which is cool, like other agencies and freelancers, but they’re also sharing information with their clients and then sharing it with agencies so that they can share with their clients.

Brad Morrison:

That’s a kind of a core part of who we are, and you’re right, we have [inaudible 00:28:10], one of the whole points of the Happy Hour, other than a chance for me to drink bourbon. It’s a good excuse for that too, but it’s a way just, let’s just come together, and if you have a question, we’ll pull some people together that might… We don’t know all the answers, but we’ll pull some people together that might be able to help and do that. So, yeah. Yeah, I think that’s… And that’s interesting that that… I love that there’s a proven way that that worked in the last recession as well, yeah.

Joe:

Yeah, for sure. As a quick side note, I don’t imbibe very often. I am usually holding a drink more than I’m actually drinking it, but my brother got me some bourbon whiskey from upstate New York, that was made in upstate New York and made, I guess at John Daly. I used Arnold Palmer and poured some whiskey into it.

Brad Morrison:

Excellent.

Joe:

It was fantastic. It was great, a nice pairing with the cigar I smoked last night.

Brad Morrison:

Nice. Was it Widow Jane? What was the bourbon? Do you know?

Joe:

The name didn’t jump out at me, but I will link it in the show notes and I’ll send it to you, of course. For everybody listening, you can get the show notes over at howibuilt.it. But yeah, it was really good, and he lives in Glens Falls in upstate New York. So there’s a big lake there and I think a lot of brewing and distilling going on up there.

Brad Morrison:

Yeah, it’s so popular right now. I’ve seen a lot of smaller distilleries and breweries have been hit pretty bad by this as well. We have customers and friends that just focus on building websites and handle marketing for the craft beer industry. And so that’s, again, it’s…

Brad Morrison:

I think one other interesting thing about this is we’ve always, if you look at all of our customers, the ones that tend to be really thriving before this, they are agencies that focus on a particular niche, which is why we started that Facebook group, the Niche Agency Owners group. This has kind of rattled that a little bit, right?

Joe:

Yeah.

Brad Morrison:

Because if you’re focused on the wrong niche during this time, then you don’t have the diversity and client base in order to offset what you’re losing. And that’s something you had asked about earlier and I probably went off on a tangent, but I think something that’s been really helpful for us is having a lot of low cost subscriptions across a lot of different customers. We don’t necessarily have the small business, but we do have several hundred agencies that have subscriptions across many different industries, and I think that has helped. Whereas if we were focused on the vacation rental market or we were focused on… I’ve even seen it in some medical areas, because of this, alternative medicine has been kind of devalued in Google search. And so that’s something that we’ve heard back from a couple of our clients that, okay, so we do some SEO stuff for these clients and it’s a struggle right now because this is our niche and it’s an alternative medicine type industry, and now they’re dropping in the rankings right and left because Google is trying to promote certain things in their search results.

Joe:

Yeah, that’s really interesting and it makes me think about… And this is probably a worthwhile topic, especially because you see agencies across a bunch of niches, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how businesses like that can pivot. Hertz is going out of business. Apparently, they were struggling before this anyway, which I suspect is the case for a lot of… JCPenny is going out of business. JCPenny, I was convinced had already gone out of business.

Brad Morrison:

You’re like, “Those stores are still around?”

Joe:

My mom’s like, “Go to JCPenny,” and I’m like, “What do you mean? They’ve been closed for years.” What could some place like that do to help ease the pain? Nobody is renting cars right now? Do you reach out to your top customers and say, “Hey, if you prepay for a year of car rentals or sign up for a membership where you get X amount of car rentals a month,” will that stave that off? Do they already offer that? I know a lot of people who have small shops where I’m like, maybe you should be doing like Zoom consults since people can actually come into your spa or whatever.

Joe:

All of that’s to say that I’ve heard distilleries who have pivoted and started making hand sanitizer, one local to my area. But what do you think businesses can do maybe an hour field, small businesses, to pivot their own products and make sure that they don’t lose everything overnight like vacation rental people have, or what can they do to help their clients recognize the pivot, if that makes sense?

Brad Morrison:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing is knowing your capabilities. It’s easy if you say, instead of, “We serve the vacation rental market by doing so and so, so and so,” if you kind of look at yourself and say, “Okay, we can build websites, we can sell widgets,” whatever it is, right? It doesn’t have to be agency focused. “This is what we do. Who else can we do that for?” Right? So that’s the easy thing is just looking and saying, “For us,” you look across the board and you say, “Okay, well, we do site maintenance really well. We do page builds for agencies right now, but we do page builds really well. We do content edits, logging into the admin panel and doing stuff that others can do, but they may not want to do, not the best use of their time.”

Brad Morrison:

So for us it’s, okay, what else could we do? Now, we’re not necessarily doing this, but we could say if there was another niche like agencies that we serve right now, we could say, you know what, all these eCommerce sites that are really thriving right now, guess what they need? They need site maintenance. They need content edits. They may need page builds or landing page builds for the campaigns that they’re doing. And maybe it’s not all, eCommerce, maybe it’s a specific segment of eCommerce site, and maybe we could easily take what we have at GoWP and we could spin that up as something else because we’re still leveraging the talent that we have.

Brad Morrison:

So I think that’s one thing is kind of just knowing that list of things that you do really well. Forgetting the target audience that you’re serving right now and look for something that another target audience that might be able to benefit from what you offer, I would not just jump into that. I would certainly do the research to call, make sure there’s a need for that, do something so that you throw up a landing page and start running ads to it, just so you can test that and see if it’s something that’s viable.

Joe:

Yeah. Oh man, that’s such a great idea, and it’s true, right? Because now you’re not focusing on the thing you’re making, you’re focusing on what you do, right? Or maybe you’re not focusing on the what, you’re focusing on the how to bring it to a bigger picture. I think that’s great because I think a lot of people get stuck in the, “Well, this is the thing I do. How am I going to be able to do that?” So I think that’s really good advice.

Joe:

And then I wanted to elaborate on what you said there about running ads because a lot of people are pulling back money and they’re tightening their purse strings or whatever, maybe like a nicer way to say that. For me personally, it has been a very expensive month for me because I’ve got new trademarks in the works for my course. I just upgraded a couple of services to make sure the new course I’m rolling out is going to be good and that I could do it today, and I’m focusing on the things like that. How do you know what to keep spending money on and what you can cut back on? And do you think that ads is something that should or should not be on the chopping block? I don’t have a lot of experience with buying ads. I generally don’t do that, maybe I should, but what are your thoughts on that?

Brad Morrison:

I always love a shotgun approach of experiment with as much as you can, right? I don’t believe in spending money without tracking it and making sure you know if it’s going to work, but I do believe… My general answer when someone approaches with an opportunity, even on advertising or partnership or what is usually, “Okay, we’ll try that.” It generally is. As long as it’s not a crazy expensive investment, we budget, I’ve got a certain amount that we’ve set aside for our advertising budget, and okay, if things are running fine and we’re not like… we’ll try it, but then we’ll be quick to fire, right? We’ll kill it very quickly if we look at it and say, “Okay, this isn’t the right… Look at the data, it’s not making sense.

Brad Morrison:

So I think in times that are good, in times that are bad, it’s very important to have whatever your approach is. You could just say, “You know what, we’re just going to focus on this one thing and then we’re going to try and go into the next.” I like to have several things going at one time, measure the impact, see what happens. Not everything is directly related to a conversion in the way of, oh, they came to our site and they bought something, right? There are other ways. You need to track other goals and ways that things can pay off, because maybe you’re getting a ton of… like your Facebook group is really growing because of that, which will turn in a longer sales cycle that’ll turn into money on down the road.

Brad Morrison:

So for us, it’s try as many things as you can, but if something is working because you know because you have the data, I don’t think it’s a good idea to pull back right now. I don’t. In fact, I think if you’re paying for ads, things are probably going to get cheaper. There’s going to be less competition. Your competitors are probably just looking at the line item in the budget and they’re trying to save that money and maybe saving in the wrong places. So I think this is the time to double down on things that are working. If you need to cut spend, if you need to cut your expenses, then sure, you have to look across everything and fit, but this isn’t where I start. This is certainly not where I start if there is a conversion point of some way.

Brad Morrison:

And not only that, think about like with Facebook ads, we’ll just take that. Think about the people right now that are all online, so many people all online, all day long. So the visibility of that is great, and when things turn and competition does come back in, you have established yourself as, okay, they’ve been here the whole time. And so I think it’s really important to keep spending money on the things that are working and probably invest a little bit more now, if you can afford to do that.

Joe:

Today’s episode is brought to you by Smile and their product TextExpander. Save time typing and boost your productivity with TextExpander. You know I’m all about automation and TextExpander is a great way to get started with automation. It allows you to create your own snippets for repetitive texts you tend to use everywhere; add the text, create a snippet, and boom, save precious time and keystrokes.

Joe:

One of my favorite snippets is for my address. So instead of typing out my full address and risking typos, I simply type $ADDR and TextExpander does the rest, filling in my full adjusts for me. I also have snippets for my street, my city and my zip code, but that’s not all TextExpander does. With its advanced snippets, you can create fill-ins, pop-up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or AppleScript.

Joe:

Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is when I type PPT. That will take whatever text I have on my clipboard and convert it to plain text. So I’m no longer fighting formatting when I copy from a word document, a Google Doc or a plain HTML page like a website. I also use it for common links, email messages, which I can completely customize with fill-ins and drop-down menus and even date calculations. I’m currently writing a book and TextExpander has been instrumental with that.

Joe:

TextExpander is available on macOS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone and iPad, so pretty much anywhere you do computing. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or automation in general, now is the time. As a listener, you can get 20% off your first year. Just visit textexpander.com/podcast and let them know How I Built It sent to you. That’s textexpander.com/podcast for 20% off your first year. And now, back to the show.

Joe:

You’re absolutely right, people are online a lot more right now. They’re at home, they’re maybe looking for tools there, but maybe they’re not ready to spend. I think what you said about a longer sales cycle is really important. I try to tell my podcast advertisers that somebody needs to hear something like six times before they’re perhaps ready to purchase. They’re like buying a single episode spot. Unless your offer is really compelling, it’s not going to do anything. I usually turn sponsors away if they only want to do one episode because I don’t want them to waste their money. I want them to sponsor my show and be like, “Wow, that worked like gangbusters,” not, “I just spent 400 bucks for nothing.”

Joe:

So I think that’s really good. If something’s working, it’s not a good idea to pull it back, and experiment with a bunch of stuff. I think that’s really great. Obviously like you said, don’t just spend money all willy-nilly. Make it measured and see what works, and if it’s not working, get rid of it immediately. But if you can afford it, it’s worth spending the money. I just tweeted about this. I cheaped out on email hosting and I calculated that. It probably cost me about $1,200 in my own time based on my hourly rate, when I could have spent 36 bucks a year, which is like 20 years or something like that. So maybe don’t cheap out on the things that you need and cut the expenses that you don’t actually need, the nice to haves.

Brad Morrison:

Something very similar to that, and sometimes it does pay off, like looking and questioning the tools that you’re using. We were using for our kind of chatbot and chat software on our site, we were spending $500 a month for something, and that’s a big line item for us, right?

Joe:

Yeah, for sure.

Brad Morrison:

That’s a big line item, and so we’re like, okay, do we need… We know it’s important to our lead flow. We know that that’s important and we know it helps our customers. That’s the other thing is we have it installed on our client portal and they use the chat and it’s very efficient and it works great. And so we didn’t want to kill it. It’s similar to what you were doing by replacing a tool. But just in times that are good, I never cared about that line item. It’s like we just spend the money, right? But now with this, and this is where I get into the opportunity because there are some things that are out there that may really help your business that you don’t even know about, but because of this situation, you start questioning things and want to examine how you’re doing it and see if there’s a better way. And so we did that and we were able to go from $500 a month to $100 a month and really have more flexibility and a better tool that we would not have even found had I not tried to do that.

Brad Morrison:

So I think some good can certainly come, but notice we did not say, “We’re spending $500 a month on chatbot. We don’t need a chatbot.” That wasn’t what it was. It was how do we replace that? After examining that, I might’ve come back and said, “$500 on this is the way to go because that’s the best that’s out there and it’s important to us.” But we were able to, and maybe it’s rare, but we were able to find something that really does the job better for a fraction of the price.

Joe:

Yeah. I mean, I think it really depends on the tool. I think another example of this is we’re probably friends with both of these companies, but I was using one form builder in WordPress. It’s a great product, that’s why I switched to it, but I ended up going back to a previous form builder in WordPress because my needs and the cost analysis showed that it was a better deal for me to go back to what I was originally using. So I think that’s really important.

Joe:

Well, we’re a little over in time, that’s fine. I do want to ask you though, you have a chatbot. I have always gone back and forth on this, “Should I have it? It’s just me.” Do you have somebody ready respond to the chatbot at any time? Is it like ping Slack for you, and then the first person to answer, or is there a dedicated person, or is it just like, “We’ll get back to you sometime.”?

Brad Morrison:

I will pull the curtain back on that one, right?

Joe:

Yeah.

Brad Morrison:

I got to be careful about that in case we have customers listening. Now, we specifically do not answer in real time. Our service is 24/7. We have WordPress Happiness engineers that can do things around the clock, but it’s not like someone submits that and then we’re immediately jumping on that the next five minutes and responding back to them in 10 minutes saying, “It’s done.” So there’s a little bit of leeway with our turnaround time so that we can prioritize tasks, but we do have staff fully around the clock. We do not on what we call the growth team, the sales and marketing side. That tends to be a nine to five Eastern Standard Time.

Brad Morrison:

We have customers all over the world, so Australia, UK. We’ve got customers everywhere, so we can’t really set the expectation that we have that 24/7. So we use it a little more passively. Yes, it comes into Slack. Yes, we do get notified. I get a notification on my phone at 2:00 in the morning if that’s when it happens. So yes, I do, but I don’t jump on it at 2:00 in the morning, and Caylin and Emily from our growth team, they don’t jump on that at 2:00 in the morning. It’s basically when they get back in, and then we kind of treat it the same way you would email.

Joe:

Got you.

Brad Morrison:

But it works really well. And then with a chatbot, you can kind of lead people down a certain path, which is good. But we do use it passively as opposed to someone standing ready to engage with that immediately. We made a decision when we started GoWP that… I had a lot of help desk experience. You don’t want the pager, right? Do you remember? I don’t know.

Joe:

Right.

Brad Morrison:

You’re younger than me. Do you remember that? I don’t know if you remember.

Joe:

I get that reference, and [inaudible 00:48:14].

Brad Morrison:

So it’s not like, “Pager? What do you…” But you walk around with a pager and then boom, boom, boom, emergency and you need to jump on that, right? We’re not an emergency support provider. What we do is a little bit different, and so it is always going to be more passive. And what that allows us to do is whether it’s sales, marketing or the fulfillment of our services, we’re able to do the prioritization of that and spend time on.

Brad Morrison:

That’s what I would say. It’s a long answer to that like all the answers I’ve given, but I would say that if you’re looking at doing that, don’t change your workflow and the way you do things for something like a chat platform.

Joe:

Got you. No, that’s super helpful, right? Because I’ve implemented one and I was like… It was a pre-sales chatbot that I had on the courses and somebody was asking me and I’m texting them while I’m driving to the Yankees-Phillies game. Not while I am driving, let me just clear.

Brad Morrison:

Be clear, yes.

Joe:

I can barely text when I’m not driving. And then I’m like, “Is this worth it, to take away time at a baseball game for a $29 course? It’s probably not.” And so I just mixed the chatbot, but I still think that’s really helpful. So that was great.

Joe:

As we come up on time here, as the show has evolved here in 2020, I asked my guests for tips and trade secrets and they’re like generally too similar. So I will say, in this pandemic recession economy, do you have any trade secrets for the listeners on how they can get through it? You’ve provided us with lots of great information, but if you could give them like the one takeaway, what would that be?

Brad Morrison:

It’s probably a little more touchy-feely than tangible go find this tool, but it really is. Maybe we’ve had a lot of bad things happen over the years, but when you’re talking about uncertainty and with the pandemic, you’re talking about how you deal with adversity, how do you solidify or build your business up so that when bad things happen or adversity comes that you’re not impacted much?

Brad Morrison:

One thing I have just… I don’t want to say I live for these moments because you don’t want this to happen, what’s happening. It’s very unfortunate. It’s does have an impact on us and our customers, but I do embrace it. What I have found, we’ve seen adversity in so many different ways, loss of a massive customer over the years where your cashflow is impacted like that, some of your star staff no longer being with you for whatever reason, maybe resigning so your team changes. We’ve relied and built an entire segment of our business around the tool, and then that tool went away because we didn’t control it and it was a third-party tool.

Brad Morrison:

So to me, this is another challenge or a season of adversity that we can look at and say… Because every time when I look at those other challenges, we came out stronger. It prompted me to do something in the business that made our business stronger. It’s different for each thing, but just having that framework and that idea that, okay, let’s embrace this and learn about ourselves and figure out what we can do to get out to be stronger on the other side of this, that’s what I would say. So don’t sit around thinking, woe is me and things are in ruin. Do what you have to do to make sure that your business is solvent, that your people are taken care of, whether they’re team and customers, and look for the hidden opportunities that will make your business stronger on the other side.

Joe:

Yeah, absolutely. That is great. I think about, like it’s easy to be a fan of a sports team – I really miss baseball – when it’s a good team. But if you stick by them when they’re terrible, that’s really how I know I’m a New York Giants fan-

Brad Morrison:

You need the rebuilding. You’ve got to have the rebuilding to have the championships.

Joe:

Yeah, exactly. If things are good, then you’re not really challenged. I feel like you’re just kind of lucky, right? It almost makes me think about… I have a three-year-old and I have another one on the way as we record this and-

Brad Morrison:

Congrats, by the way.

Joe:

Thank you very much. I’m very excited. It’s a boy, so we have one of each, or we’ll have one of each.

Brad Morrison:

Yeah, all right.

Joe:

Yeah. But I struggle between coddling my daughter and trying to shield her from things that I know will probably hurt her, or just like letting her go out and explore so that she can experience things and know for herself. And I know it’s not quite the same, but if you shelter your kid or yourself, I feel like they or you are going to be worse off for it.

Brad Morrison:

I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, absolutely.

Joe:

Cool. Well, what a nice note to end that on. Brad, thanks so much for your time. I always love talking to you. Where can people find you?

Brad Morrison:

You can find me Twitter @MBradMorrison. I’m on Facebook. We have the Facebook Niche Agency Owners group also. So you can just go to GoWP Niche Agency Owners group.

Joe:

Awesome. I will link all of that and lots of other stuff we talked about in the show notes over at howibuilt.it. Brad, thanks so much for joining me this week.

Brad Morrison:

Joe, thank you so much for having me on. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion.

Joe:

Thanks so much to Brad for joining us this week. There was a lot of stuff in this episode to unpack. All of it will be at the show notes or on the show notes, in the show notes, over at howibuilt.it/172.

Joe:

Now, I really like a lot about what he said about checking in with your staff and your customers, being a bit human. Right now I think that’s probably the best thing any of us can do, but then managing your cashflow. He didn’t say stop spending money. He said plug some of the leaks and if there’s something where you can save money or there’s something that you definitely don’t need to pay for because it’s not really helping your business and it’s just a nice to have, then do something about that.

Joe:

And then with the pivot, I think the pivot is really important if you are a web developer, if you’re somebody who doesn’t need to pivot but you serve as clients, definitely give your client or your customers some ideas for what they can do because it’s hard out there right now. And figuring out how to pivot, I heard an interesting analogy on a different podcast where they said it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle, so maybe just a different perspective in saying, “This is what we do. Who else can we do that for?” I think that’s really, really great. As for me, I’m going to check out chatbots and see if I can get them to help my own business.

Joe:

But anyway, thank a lot to Brad. That was a long and rambling recap, but I thought there was a lot of good information in there. Thanks as well to our sponsors for this week. They are CircleCI and TextExpander. Without their support, the show wouldn’t happen, so check them out. They’ll be linked over at the show notes as well, howibuilt.it/172. If you liked this episode, please give it a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people discover the show.

Joe:

Now, one last thing, a little bit of housekeeping, is this is technically the last episode of season eight. However, thanks to the generosity of the previously mentioned sponsors, CircleCI and TextExpander, I’m going to be able to continue throughout the rest of June doing a few bonus episodes and things like that. So if you want to write in, let me know what you’re thinking about. If you’d like my perspective on anything, I’m happy to do an episode about that, but we get a couple of bonus episodes this year in between seasons eight and nine. Season nine is going to focus very much on creating great content to build your audience online, which I think is an important lesson that we’ve heard time and time again this season, which is why I selected it for the theme of season nine.

Joe:

Okay, so I think that’s everything. Man, I covered a lot there. It’s all going to be summed up at the show notes, on the show notes, in the show notes, over at howibuilt.it/172. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.