Should I Pay Per Project or Hire Full Time Employees? | With Expert Johnathan Grzybowski

And then, you know, talking about the model, because you, you know, when you had an agency, you're probably managing different people, trying to hire Have different processes for each different kind of responsibility or key kind of role. How many designers do you have working with the team? And what were the initial costs to get Penji started in, I think it was 2017, and making that shift from the agency model?

A lot of— away from the agency model?

Yeah, I mean, you moved from traditional marketing agency to design agency.

Yeah, so, well, I wouldn't consider Penji a design agency now, but I would say more so it's just a design service.

Yeah.

We had all of our designers in the beginning were based in the United States. We were probably paying them somewhere around $40,000 to $60,000 a year. They were able to do nowhere near the caliber of what a designer can do overseas. We decided to build technology surrounding our our service. And then that's when we realized that we had to scale. So we ended up taking a lot of our designers here in the United States and turned them into project managers. And then they manage the design team in order to create the production. So that's what we do right now. Most of our designers are based in the Philippines.

Mm-hmm.

We have all of our— and we have a couple of others in other countries as well. We have an account somewhere over 150 designers. They are all employees of Penji. They are not freelancers. You're not working with a freelance designer. You are working with a dedicated individual if that's what you want. And I think one of the benefits of Penji is there's 150 designers, which means that there's skill sets of every single type.

Mm-hmm.

So if you needed a— and again, I think the benefit of a service like ours, if you hire a freelancer, you need a website design, right? You need an app design, you need a logo design as well if you're a brand new startup. If you're an agency owner, you need somebody who specializes in Facebook ads and social media content. And maybe you get that one-off project where they need like a website design, or maybe you need like a banner of some kind. Contrary to belief, the people who don't understand how graphic design works, they assume that one person can handle that. And that's, that's actually not true. So, um, you wouldn't want a plumber to fix your door, right? So, or you want to— what, a door— like a, uh, a handyman to fix your, your, your leak? That's just not what they're good at. So, right. Um, is the same rules apply for Penji? I think that's the real benefit is that there's literally— go, when you sign up for the service, you have access to all these people and you can request whatever you want and still pay the same rate.

So you have logo designers, you have UI/UX, you have website, you have, you know, obviously those are different type of design. Graphic designers are different than website, right? So you get access to all kinds of professionals, right?

Exactly.

Yeah. And how are you managing those creators? So you said they're all employees. Are they, is it kind of still like a marketplace model where the employees, but they get paid per work? Are they full-time and they're getting salaries and—

Full-time salaries. Those who qualify receive benefits. I think one of the most important things that we— and I think this goes for anybody who's listening right now— is that your customers are not number one. Your people are number one. And I think we need to shape— change that focus as to the level of importance. There will always be another customer, right? But there's never going to be potentially another employee as dedicated as, uh, and as good as that particular individual is. Now, if that employee obviously is consistently doing a bad job, then there needs to be repercussions for those actions. However, the minute that you blame a team member, on about a particular job, about maybe doing the wrong job, or about maybe messing up or not designing something of quality, they're going to remember that, right? And they're going to make— they're going to remember the time that you made them feel not important. And so we take great lengths in order to be fair and treat each team member, uh, as like a human being. And I want to add one more thing too, is a lot of times when people hire individuals that may not be originally from America, right? And I'm speaking specifically to Americans. I'm speaking specifically to maybe even Canadians, but primary large economic countries.

Sure.

They have this stigma of, oh, you don't speak a native English language, then that means you in turn could be stupid. And that is not the case at all. And that's something that I'm incredibly proud of, that we embrace our cultures, we embrace those who work for us, and they're just as good, if not better, than that of somebody in a first-world country.

Right. We have that kind of status, or I mean, we try to self-impose the Belief of ourselves, right, that we're better or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's, that's actually a really good point. I mean, they're people as well, right? Just because they're born somewhere else doesn't mean you should treat them any less.

Sure.

Yeah, I guess, how do you choose? I mean, you have these projects coming in, they're like, we need a website logo, we need our app design. How do you guys choose on the type of complexity of the request? How do you just— which designer to assign the project to when you have 150 of them?

Well, that's just based off of an algorithm that we've created Um, within ourselves. But for the most part, um, people that are listening is if this person is consistently getting positive reviews about a particular category, then they're going to get paired with the person that continues to get positive reviews. A lot of times we actually get the design process wrong. Um, and, and so that's where we kind of have to educate our customers that we could find another designer. Because I mean, like, yeah, because some— I mean, you might want a more feminine touch, but then you got paired with a man who is more of a masculine touch. That doesn't mean the designer is bad, it just means that you got to find it. You gotta, you gotta let the person know. And honestly, another thing too that I think, uh, people should be made aware of is, especially the people that are listening, is a lot of times when you submit something When you tell an employee what to do, I can almost guarantee you, you're doing a crappy job of it. Because when you submit— when you try and talk to another human being, in your head, you probably think that you're organized and that you're very clear and that the instructions are as obvious as you think. And the fact of the matter is, is that it's not. Mm-hmm. And so we, as an internal team, go to great lengths In order to make sure that our team understands with 100% confidence and certainty that they're receiving instructions that they are comfortable with. So we use a service called Loom.

Mm-hmm.

And we not only create written instructions, but we also use video instructions as well in order to show the designer or to show the team member Uh, the instructions that they need in order to complete their job.

So you guys are creating this, or is this from the client, or it's in the in-between?

That's what we do to all of our team members. But the reason why I shared that story is because a lot of times customers don't know how to explain themselves. Um, and so you need to be able to explain yourself in a very clear manner. And I think it comes down to organization.

Yeah, I guess that's super important when, especially with design, right? I think people take it very personal, like anything, right? Represents your brand or People take it very personal. They want it their way. They have their vision, but it's very hard to articulate that, I guess, and communicate unless you can explain it properly. Yeah. Well, let's, let's talk about kind of the secret we're all kind of interested. How did you guys get listed? No, I'll remove that word listed because we talked about before the show. How do you guys get on the Inc. 5000? What, what was it that, uh, got the interest of being on there?

So I think that there's, um, well, in order for you to get on there, you have to hit a certain milestone of around like $2.2, $2.5, um, million in revenue per year. Um, so we obtained the revenue mark, but I think how we got there was more so along the lines of these different stages that we, that we, uh, used.

Mm-hmm.

And so every time that we, uh, grew, we kind of broke it down in terms of stages. So our first like 100 customers was basically just hard work and grit where we interviewed, as mentioned before, like 200, uh, 100, 50, 200 people. And we said, essentially, if we built this, will you buy it? And a large majority of them said yes. They became our first 100 customers. And then in that aspect, we went into stage 2, which is more so like the content marketing, SEO realm, where we're just writing content and resources and getting on— no, don't take this personally, but like— It's not your podcast, but just easy to obtain podcast interviews.

Sure.

In which, because you want important guests, you want fun guests, and then in turn it's going to potentially be self-serving and help you, or maybe it helps the audience, whatever it is. But you have a website that people go to and you're talking about us. So now that's like stage 2, stage 3. So now we need people to talk about us in stage 3. So how can we get more people to understand us? How, um, uh, how can we get more people to talk about us? How can we get more people to, uh, write about us in like reviews and Google reviews, Facebook reviews, whatever it may be? That's stage 3. Stage 4 is more so along the lines of advertising. So now we have a pretty decent amount of revenue. How can we take a portion of that revenue and then funnel it back into the system of the Facebooks and the Googles and things like that? In order to obtain the sales. And then I would say the, the one of the final stages is just kind of like doing all of them all at once and just adding as much gasoline to the fire. And so now we have this incredible cycle of, of, uh, of lead generation where we can spend an X number of dollars and we'll be able to obtain Y in return. We're able to create, uh, X number of blog articles and we can expect an increase of Y within, uh, our overall outreach and our page views on our website. And so we're just building this massive machine of content, and we're building this massive machine of just, uh, of ads, of, of seeing the Pengi name, hearing the brand. And eventually you're going to come to a point and either get curious and look into the service because you see it so much, um, you're going to become a customer hopefully, or you're going to share it with a friend. And I feel like The— and I know I said that before, but the final step is kind of just like asking for referrals.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and, and I know that's not like— there isn't a cookie cutter. Things can go through along the way, but there was a point in time where we had no idea who our customers were. We were incredibly afraid of talking to our customers because we were afraid that we would lose them or that they would cancel the service. And now we are at a point where we have so much confidence in what we do that we talk to just about every single customer that comes through Penji. We ask them questions. How did you hear about us? Why did you choose us? What can we do to make our service better? And then we use their— we use whatever they tell us in order to benefit the service.