Interview with Corey Gauteraux from G4 Design House – Small Business Show 157

The Small business show episode 157 for Wednesday, February 7, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, the show that is by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and in Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean. How goes it out there, man?

It comes and it goes. It's good, it's good. I'm working with it. I'm really off kilter today, Shannon. I totally rearranged my studio and things that used to be controlled with my right hand or controlled with my left hand. And it's a little. Yeah, it's a little weird. I don't know that I did the ergonomics correctly, but, you know, I'll figure it out and then probably change things around. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. So if we know we start, things start going crazy on the show, we'll know it's your fault.

It's totally my fault. That's right.

Awesome. That's great. Well, hey, we've got a guest here today with us and one of the things we talk about all the time on the Small Business show is your online presence, how important everything is, your website, all that good stuff, your search engine optimization. So joining us today is Corey Goodreau, one of the founders of G4 Design House, and he's going to talk about his business, about creating and managing your online brand marketing and more good stuff like that. So thanks for joining us today, Corey.

Hey, guys, how are you doing?

Good, man. We're excited to have you on the show and talk about your business. So tell us about G4. What's your core business and how you got things started and how your business works.

Web design is our core business and we also do marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click, and things like that. We started probably about five years ago. It was, we, we've had a couple different businesses in the past and we did a lot of our own web design, web development, marketing for those businesses. And about five years, five years ago, we decided that we were so good at it that we were going to create a new business out of it and do it for other people. So that's what, that's how it started.

Nice. Yeah.

So.

So you have lots of experience in this area and you, you've spun off G4 about five years ago to focus and offer those other small businesses. Right.

Started in business about 20 years ago and we started developing our own websites and of course doing our own marketing campaigns. One of the things that we never did was outsource our needs. And so we kind of had to learn as we went. And I think that made our abilities much stronger. And so when we did start our business five years ago, we were pretty much ahead of the game.

No, that's great.

That's great. I will say this. My greatest successes have come from exactly this. Taking a skill that you had to develop on your own for some other business and then turning that into your business. But my greatest regrets come from looking back at all of the skills that I developed that I didn't turn into other businesses. So I'm always happy to hear about people that are smart enough to capitalize on the things that I probably missed out on. So there you go. That's great, man.

Wow, that's really cool. And so you guys, I mean you've been doing this for a long, long time. What, you know, kind of are there best practices that you, you know, implement for small businesses that come to you and say, hey, you know, what do we do? How do we, you know, get, get our website which may, you know, need, they need help with and how does the program work?

What we try to do is our whole concept behind G4 Design House is to make growing a new website and growing the business a lot more affordable and easier for people. Most places you go to, if you're going to an agency especially, you're going to pay a lot of money up front in order to get a website. And so we took our past business model, which is monthly payment plans, and converted it into our G4 project and basically allow all of our clients to make affordable monthly payments. And that allows them to. That gives us the ability to market to new websites, new businesses, medium sized businesses, large corporations. We can do the entire gamut of business types. So it makes it a lot better for us on our marketing side.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so, you know, they come in and I mean your site looks awesome@g4designhouse.com and everything. I've always seen you guys do the quality and the graphics and the layout and everything. The build quality has been fantastic. What does somebody get for like, you know, it looks like on your site you say start at like 1 99amonth for a small business, what do they start there and then they add on like a la carte things or is there a package that they get for that price?

Our services are pretty all encompassing and that's one of the. Another benefit of being a client of ours is that we're not going to do those add on costs for Every little thing that you want to get, you know, we do logo concepts, mockups so they approve design before we build anything. We provide, you know, contact forms, any sort of widget or plugin that they may need to perform different functions for their website. Whether it's memberships, a forum, you know, there's so many different things that people can want and it's all encompassing. And we do the 199amonth and that, that goes on for 12 months, which is really basically what's cool. We only require somebody to be with us for 12 months. That's the contract after that if they choose to go away or their business fails, which sometimes it unfortunately does, they're not locked in and liable to us for, you know, years on end. So it basically becomes a month to month plan after that.

So you have a ramp up period that you know that this is the minimum amount of time that you want a client to spend with you. It's the time that it takes them to really be convinced of the value. Is that a good way of, of saying it or a time that it take? The time that it takes for you to demonstrate value?

Of course, yeah. I mean when somebody, and that's, I think there's a big misconception among people out there that when you create a website all of a sudden you're going to just start getting traffic and you're going to get customers and, and all of a sudden your business. Well, unfortunately in the web space it doesn't work that way. Google's huge. I'm sure everyone's done a search for something and found thousands of links to other websites and that's the way it is and you're competing with all those people online. So the website itself is step one. Then you have to go into, okay, now that I have this great looking website, what am I going to do with it? And that's when you get into social media marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click, whatever the avenue of marketing that you want to go down, it's going to entail and we provide those services as well. So we would rather, I guess a package deal or offer both of our services to our client than just the a la carte website because we'd rather be in control of the end result. So we know that we're providing a long relationship with our customer that's going to get them results.

Got it.

Yeah, that's cool because I'm definitely one of those people that have tried in the past, like, oh, we're going to throw this site up There. And now we're done. Look how beautiful it looks. And you're right, it is. That is like step one on the, on the, the roadmap to success, right?

Sure, sure. I mean, you know, there's wix, there's all types of do yourself services out there. And that's great for somebody that maybe has marketing skills themselves, is really taking advantage of social media, blogging and really doing their part to make sure that their site is successful. But you know, most people don' have the time, the energy, the cost to do that sort of thing. So that's when they reach out to us and we can offer our services.

That's pretty cool.

That's huge.

Yeah. And that, you know, it is really all encompassing. So it is, it is far greater than just that. Oh, we're going to build you the site. It's like we're going to really hold your hand through this, you know, 12 month process and get you up and running. So that's really cool.

12 months is just the start. I mean, you know, we have clients that have been with us since day one. They have multiple websites with us. They, you know, we've remodeled their first website that we built to make it a little bit more current, you know, so we try to have those really long lasting relationships.

Yeah, that's, that's killer. All right, so now we know what you do, how it works, all that kind of stuff. Let's talk about your, you know, kind of the back end your business, you know, if you will, what is the most challenging part of your business? And you mentioned like WIX and some of these other, you know, off the shelf sites and competitors. I would think it's a pretty competitive space, but maybe that's not your most challenging thing. What's the most challenging part of business and what have you guys done to overcome it?

You know, you actually pretty much nailed it. It is web development and web design, marketing. It's got to be one of the most congested business I've ever seen. I mean, just in San Diego, I mean there are thousands of developers. So I mean, and we're competing against San Francisco, New York, all the big, all the big games. But you know, web design is everywhere. There's freelancers, you know, you're competing with companies that hire, you know, individuals from the Philippines and India. That's pretty popular. So there is a ton of competition out there. And so generating new clients is our biggest challenge for sure.

And how do you guys do that? Do you have a team of salespeople or reaching out or are you really focused on the, you know, inbound marketing? What have you found works the best for you guys?

I am. We've been focusing and continue to focus on AdWords and pay per click. That does really well for us.

You do your own thing like the thing that you would do for your clients is what you do for you.

Too much search engine optimization, of course, social media, publishing. We do have sales agents that work outside of our office that travel. They do cold calls from their home or they travel locally in their their state or we have a couple of guys that we just hired for example here in San Diego so they're going around and getting gener new sales for us. So we do have that aspect of it. But yeah, I mean the pay per click and SEO, that's the biggest probably avenue that we take.

Yeah, that's great. And your target kind of demographic, you know, are you going after, you know, the sole proprietor type of small business or larger, you know, S Corps or llc, you know, kind of mid sized companies or are you just taking whoever comes to you, you come up with a unique solution for them?

We do take on any client from the, from the new business like you mentioned to large corporations that have established companies for a long period of time that just kind of need to refresh their brand. It's it, you know, probably primarily the medium sized business is our, is our top client and that's fine. I mean they're great to work with. You know, large corporations can be a little bit more difficult to work with sometimes because they have certain needs and that you have to meet and time restraints and things like that that maybe the smaller business doesn't. And then of course the new business you have to worry about, you know, them going out of business or not being successful. And so you have to gauge how you approach each one a little bit differently as far as the sales process and the cost for the customer which we generally try to keep it equal across the board. But you know there's going to be, you know, times where you have a little difference there.

Yeah, sure. I mean I imagine if a, you know, corporation, you know, large business comes to you and wants a specific project, you guys going out and providing a quote for that, that type of event versus just the standard subscription model type thing.

Yeah, completely different. You know, you're going to have an RFP with a large corporation and you're going to have a, they're going to provide a number of assets typically for you already. They're going to have it mapped out what they want for the most part, which is really great and nice. And compared to the new business, we get companies sometimes that are so new they really don't have a plan. They don't know what they're really doing at that point. They have an idea sometimes and that's great. But they don't really have the assets yet or the content behind it to, to really build a great website. So we have to kind of assist them with that process.

Yeah, and I would think that, you know, there's, there's really got to be pros and cons with each thing.

Right.

Where you get your, your creative juices really going with the brand new business and helping them design their logo and get their message and the brand versus, you know, these large corporate entities will come, you know, give you all that, that stuff already, but maybe more demanding and you have to jump through more hoops to address their needs perhaps.

Yeah, that's exactly on point. The large companies are great because they do know what they want. But yeah, the time constraints can be pretty cumbersome sometimes, especially when you're working on a lot of projects and you have a limited amount of staff to work on. So you kind of have to make due with cutting out time for them specifically in order to get the job done. But at the same time, yeah, you're right. The creative freedom that you have on the newer or smaller business is pretty nice, especially for our designers who like to be creative and they don't like to just input assets into a webpage. So it's nice for them particularly.

Yeah, that's cool.

I'm curious about this because it sounds like you've got a model that has sort of from a pricing standpoint, a one size fits, if not all, most. And yet you're able to provide personalized or certainly tailored service for every business that you work with. I'm curious how one size fits most. Is your pricing model. Would you say that 80% of your people are on the same model or is it higher or lower than that?

I would say probably about, maybe about 65% are on that model that you see that's on the website. That's, that fits the majority. You know, when it comes to the larger businesses, they generally don't even want to do a monthly payment plan. They, they want to kind of do it in lump sums and pay it off as they go. They don't want that monthly overhead kind of a thing going on, so they kind of knock that out. So majority of the payment plan option that we provide is going to be for the medium and small size business. For sure.

Sure. And that makes sense. Yeah. Because the medium and small size business hasn't, haven't learned yet that expenses, monthly recurring expenses are potentially the, you know, the death of you. So they add up and we're. And also to be fair, a small and medium sized business, even if they do know that lesson it, you know, just cash flow might be such that that's the only way they can make it work. Whereas a business that's a little more established and larger might have the capital reserves to be able to say, okay, well if that's going to cost us, you know, 2,500 bucks or 2,400 bucks, let's just spend that money and then we don't have to worry about, you know, where's that money in August when, you know, the 200 bucks comes around. So.

Yep, right.

Exactly. And then they're not tied to us anymore either. That's another thing for the larger companies. They don't really want to be stuck with us if they don't have to be. And when you're on a payment plan with us, I mean, as long as you're making those payments, you're sort of stuck as far as us hosting the website on our server, managing the website, that sort of a thing.

Gotcha. Okay. Oh, so you're offering hosting for this too? Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everything.

So we provide hosting. We will buy your domain for the first year, pay that cost for you if you need it. We'll set up your email accounts for you if you need that. We try to do everything so you don't have to do it.

That's cool. Yeah, well, especially, you know, it's someone that's not an expert at that and they're, you know, trying to focus on growing their business. I think that's, it's, it's awesome to have that whole, you know, all encompassing, you know, kind of hand holding, if you will. I think it's really cool. So, you know what we talk a lot about on the show here, we kind of, we refer to it as the charmed life, you know, as business owners and that it's not all about cash and stuff. Oh, look, you know, we all. Cash is king and that's how you measure success of, you know, your business. But what about you? You, what's the yardstick that you use to measure your success beyond the monetary rewards to keep you and personally or, you know, your team moving forward?

I mean, for me, personally, when I, when I look at it. It's the return clients that does it for me. When you get a lot, you know, the majority of your clients coming back and saying, you know, I have this other business, or I have, you know, this other person, or referrals. I have this other person as a friend of mine that I want to introduce you to so you can build their website. Those are the things really stand out to me that, you know, give me energy to keep doing this every single day.

Yeah, that's like your pat on the back, right? This guy's referring people. Yeah, that's cool.

Validation that your service is valuable and. And all of that. Ah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. I mean, the money is gonna. The money comes as it comes. I mean, that's just a part of it. But it's the. Exactly. It's the validation and the. The continued and returned clients that really does it. Yeah.

Hopefully it's a cycle. Right. You get that. More return customers, more referrals than that. The money side of thing is growing along the same way.

Exactly. They go hand in hand.

Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Okay, now here's a part of the show where I get to kind of call you to the mat. We always ask everybody this. You know, Dave and I are big fans of mistakes, primarily because we've probably made so many between the both of us. Speaking for myself, anyway.

No, no, no, you're right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, we learn so much from them. And so can you tell me what you're using? These little quote signs here? Of course, because you can't see that at home. What's in the best mistake you guys have made that has taught you the most about your business?

Oh, man, we make mistakes all the time. So many.

Yeah. Is there anything that stands out? You're like, wow, you know, if we don't look how much we learned or if we'd only done this differently, you know, that kind of thing.

You know, I'll talk a little bit about this client experience. I won't name any names or anything. Sure. But we had a client. It was one of our. Not our first, but one of our first websites that we was a big. It's a big project. You're talking, you know, tens of thousands of dollar project. Okay. And one of the mistakes that we did and we definitely learned from this one is making, not. Not forcing the cl. Provide us all the details, and in a really organized fashion. This was a. It was a couple, and they were starting a new business, and they. They had all these great ideas, but the way that they presented were basically kind of like a. Just a pot of information and nothing was really organized or clean. And. And we accepted it and we started the project and we kept working on it. And as we kept going, it was, oh, you forgot this, and I need this, and I need this. And it just added up and added up. And by the time we got to the end of the project, we probably lost thousands and thousands of dollars on it. And it was a real big kick in the butt that we need to make sure that especially on a big project, that the client has to be prepared. They need to be able to, you know, decisively tell us what they need. And it needs to be presented to us in an organized fashion. That way we can quote it out properly and give them the proper estimate. And then we're protecting ourselves on the back end, too.

Oh, yeah, no, that's a huge thing. Do you have like a framework now or some kind of document, you know, or proposal, you know, thing that you're giving to those customers that they're filling out to give you that data now?

Big on the bigger projects, we have a proposal that we send out and we have, basically, it's a scope of work, and as we attach it to the agreement and they have to sign off on it and then we refer back to it if we need to. I mean, since that point, we haven't really run into too many of those issues anymore because it was such a big issue at the time that, you know, now we question everything.

I was going to say, yeah, you almost don't need the new policy with the client because internally you. It. You've changed everything because of that.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yep.

Yeah, that's weird. Yeah, that's great. That's cool. Well, so what's next for you guys? I mean, are you in growth mode or are you, you know, really kind of focused on your existing customers? What's the next step for. For your business?

I mean, right now we are. We're not expand super big right now. You know, obviously we still want to get new customers, new clients, but we don't want to grow too fast. We are taking a lot of time on our current clients. We have a lot of big. Currently we have a lot of big projects that we're touching on with big, big brands. And so we're kind of putting our attention to those and making sure those are all done right. And then, of course, taking care of our, you know, we have several Hundred clients that we have currently active. And so we're managing all of their site. And you know, one of the things that we actually haven't touched upon was the platform that we build our websites in for the majority is WordPress. Although we do build HTML sites from scratch, which was that project that I was just talking about that was from scratch project. But WordPress requires a lot of management and energy. So we're kind of making sure that that's all good to go.

Yeah, that's very cool. That's awesome. So let me ask you, what's the best part of your day? I always like to ask guys like this that are going to work and you know, working with your team and you can't say five o', clock, you know, I mean, is there the part of, you know, your working environment or when you get in there that you really enjoy the most? You know, it's actually.

So I'm the first one in the office generally, me and one of my programmers. And for me it's just personally it's being able to come here first thing before anyone else is here and kind of just catch up on everything and my organizational plan and my thoughts and you know, working through emails for clients and you know, going through the project management software, making sure everything's on point again. I get like an hour and a half in the morning without having to, you know, talk to, to my staff and things like that. That allows me to complete a lot. So I like that part.

Yeah, that's nice when you have that quiet time.

Yeah, exactly. I love working my staff. They're great. I love it when they're here. We have an awesome crew here. We're definitely a family business and we are a family oriented type of office and everyone here is awesome and I love spending time with them. But that little private time is nice.

Yeah. And I would say, correct me if I'm wrong, you've had some staff that have been with you for a long time. Right, Right.

So my main programmer, IT person, he's been with us for, man, I want to say 16 years. Wow. Our lead designer has been with us since the inception of G4, so five years. We have kind of a go to a girl with many hats. She has been with us for probably seven years. So yeah, most of our employees are longtime employees. They stick with us because we, we are that family business and we kind of act that way around the office.

Yeah. And I think that that's a big statement to your success as well. And that should be another pat on Your back is that people actually, you know, people want to hang out and stay with you guys. That, that's really cool. Very good. That's true on that. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

We don't like the turnover.

Yeah. It's expensive.

Right.

And you got, you know, and you don't know who's going to walk in the door, you know, and is difficult. Yeah, yeah. And I always argue, you know, you really, you really never, you can be the greatest interviewer, but you really never know how an employee is going to, you know, what their work ethic is and how they're going to fit in your culture until they've been there for a significant amount of time. Yeah.

I mean you can, you can tell when somebody's absolutely the wrong person. But, but you know, there can be somebody that seems like they're pretty close and that pretty close over the, over the course of several years can actually be worse than hiring somebody that's not a fit at all. Right. Because it can start to drag you away from. From where your core is. Yeah, it's interesting.

Exactly. And then the longer they're here too, if it is somebody that's not quite, quite there, it makes it harder to, you know, to, if you need to let them go, it's a much harder proposition than, you know, than if it's somebody new. So. Yeah, I mean that's the worst part of anything is having to let people go. And, and so you definitely, from the get go, you want to make sure you have the right people. But yeah, it's hard just sometimes you just don't know until they're in it. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We used to do with Tech restore, we had an intern program through technical school around here. Then we would get these interns and they would come in and they would work for 100 hours. And I used to tell everybody this is your 100 hour job interview, you know, because you really kind of get them figured out over a few weeks of. And usually it was much longer because they wouldn't work all day. So it'd be a few hours every day. And some of our best folks came through that program and it's, and you're absolutely right, it is absolutely the worst thing as a small business owner to have to look, let someone go. Yeah, it's miserable.

It's personal.

It's totally personal. It's personal. But it also has like repercussions on your business life because when you're a small business owner, you know, it, it's, it's like Losing one person out of a thousand is very different than losing one person out of 10. You know, like there's work left on the table big time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

And not only that, in today's age, with the, with the social media and the reviews and, I mean, letting somebod go, even if it's for all the right reasons, is a risky proposition sometimes. I mean, it could, you know, come back to you, especially on social media, in a negative way. And that's. It's always a risk. And so, you know, the least you. These times you have to do it, the better. That's for sure.

Yeah, for sure. I always come. I always come back. I've watched one of my favorite movies, the Fifth Element, where Zorg Gary Oldman character tells a guy to lay off 2 million people and he's like, Let go 2 million. I'm like, See, we can't do that. We gotta walk in the other room and sit down with this person that you known and hung out with and you know so well.

That's cool.

I congratulate you on your success. What's the best way for our listeners to learn more about your business?

They can Visit us@g4designhouse.com and of course they can go to facebook.com G4 Design House.

That's great. Yeah, you guys do a lot of good social media over there and keep up the good work, man. I love looking at your stuff. The quality is very impressive and we appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your story and, you know, keep in touch or send some of those small business owners our way that you're helping. We'd love to talk with them.

We'll do. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for joining us, Corey. This was great. All right, folks, well, you know where to find us. Go to BusinessShow Co or our Facebook page, BusinessShow Co Facebook. Shane, you got anything else to add before we sign off here?

I think that's probably it, man. I'm, you know, pray for rain in California. We're having another dry year. So that's it.

All right, take it easy, folks. See you next week.

See you later. Take care.