Small Business Interview with David Denning Co-Founder of Jumpanzee – Small Business Show 117

The Small Business show, episode number 117 for Wednesday, May 3, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business Show. The show by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm Shannon Jean. I'm going to expand that. I like that Bay Area comment because I always recorded different spots.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, I'm at my house, I'm at my office. I'm at another place where I'm running around. So I'm just going to do that. I'm going to see how that works.

All right, that's fine by me.

Yeah, whatever works for you, man. It's like that old ZZ Top song, I'm bad, I'm nationwide.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

So soon it's just going to be. Shannon Jean. Earth.

Yeah. Google. Not Google Earth, just Earth. That's right. Hey, you know, we always talk on the show. Well, we don't always talk, but we certainly have talked in the past a lot about developing, you know, your online presence, your logo, your tagline, your website and tying all those things together. And, you know, we've talked about different ways to do that, whether you're doing it yourself, using different services. Today we're joined by David Denning, who's the founder of Jumpanzee. I love the name, which is a firm that does just those things. And Dave's going to tell us a little bit more about that. David, thanks and welcome to the show.

Hi. Thanks. Glad to be here. I am also located on Earth and happy to be on the show.

Awesome. We're happy to have you. You're in sunny Florida, is that right?

That is right. Just rained, but most of the time it's sunny.

There you go.

Yeah.

Doesn't it rain there every day? Pretty much like, yeah, 10 minutes about this time of year. It's pretty much like clockwork.

Yeah. That's cool. So, hey, give us some backstory on Jumpan Z and you know, when you started the company, some backstory on what you might have done before getting it going and what you guys do over there.

Absolutely. My wife and I started this company, so she's actually the co founder, but we started it in 2015 after getting back from South Africa where we had lived for the two years prior. So I had recently I had worked for a big engineering construction company and was doing some project management over there. And we had the opportunity to live there for two years and we came back, we realized, you Know what we really like the ability to live and travel and, and kind of see the world. And so we, we realized we kind of each had unique skill sets. She had design degree and had freelanced for years in web design and graphic design. And I had the project management and kind of business background. And we realized, hey, let's start a business together. One that lets us be location independent, work from wherever we really want to and see what happens. So we started up then probably for about a year. I did double time with my previous job in that company while she worked on it full time. And then I came off and it's been full time ever since.

So the, the impetus was, was really start to, to give you that freedom and flexibility to be wherever you guys wanted to be. Is that right?

Absolutely. That was probably our single biggest factor behind it was building a company that let us travel and kind of work from wherever, which we've taken full advantage of.

Good for you.

Yeah, that's really cool. I love that concept. And so it doesn't matter where you're at, you're mainly communicating with your customers online, that type of thing. And you can work wherever you land, right?

Absolutely. I mean, we still have phone calls and Skype from all over the world. We actually just got back last month from five months away. And so we were in Southeast Asia three of those months in the Philippines and Thailand. And we took phone calls at midnight or did Skype calls, you know, early in the mornings. And we, you know, ran the business as normal. Just kind of adjusted some, some hours when we needed to connect with clients. But other than that, you know, we could accomplish all our project work from across the world.

Yeah, that's cool. I'd love to spend a couple minutes talking a little more about that because I think there's a lot of folks that are intrigued, you know, and it has a very, you know, this great romantic kind of thing that we can, you know, be on the beach and working where you're, wherever you want. Tell me, like, I get the benefits of it right away, but what are some of the challenges of that, you know, digital nomad type thing that you guys have had to overcome?

Absolutely. And there are certainly plenty, as we found out, for like our first long extended trip. One of them is if you have any clients that aren't really set up for working with someone on different time zones or maybe not getting an immediate response to something, which we have some, some local clients that are used to dealing in person or kind of immediate phone call answers, and we try to make ourselves as available as possible, especially when we're back here. But abroad, we're on totally different time zones, so it may be a little bit before we answer something or check into something so that it's frustrating. I understand that to some clients, but really a majority of our clients all communicate online, and if we get back within 12 or 24 hours, they're completely happy. And in general, we don't really have that many issues that kind of need immediate attention. So it's only when those few things do pop up that it's definitely a challenge being on a totally different time zone. Sure. Luckily, we're night people, so having phone calls and stuff late at night when it's early morning or afternoon in the States wasn't really big of an issue for us, because we'd be up till 3 or 4 in the morning anyways, and we would sleep until 10 or so the next day. But, yeah, I would say the biggest. The biggest one was in the Philippines. Internet was a little sketchy. We were on a random island, and my brother worked as a head of a chef for a resort there, and we spent a lot of our days going from place to place trying to find the best Internet. So that was always an adventure.

Oh, yeah, for sure. So do you guys. I mean, do you consider your base of operations kind of the Florida area where you're at now, or.

Yes. Okay. We. We own a home here.

Okay.

And we're here probably at least six months of the year, and then we spend another three or six months traveling. So it's our home base.

And is your. Is your customer base in that area as well, or is it. Or is it just a much broader, you know, client base that, you know, that you take care of?

I would say at least 50% of our clients are kind of in the general area down here, and then the other half are all over the world. So it just kind of depends. It's easier to connect and network and meet people down here as opposed to meeting people across the world.

Right?

Yeah.

But I will say we have two of our team members in Southeast Asia that we had the opportunity to meet while we were over there, that we never even thought we'd have the opportunity to see them in person. So that was kind of cool. And it's a business trip if you go meet people across the world. Right. So.

Yeah, of course. Of course. That's great. So before you guys head out on, you know, your next adventure, I mean, do you have to, you know, do you feel, like, compelled to let your These local customers know, hey, this is what's going to happen or our turnaround time is going to drop out. How do you handle, you know, that interaction? So somebody's not disappointed when they try to reach you?

Yes, we definitely let them know that we're going to be traveling and kind of set those expectations and they know they can reach out and that it just may not be, you know, within the next hour that we respond to them. Sure. And in general, I mean, we have our ongoing projects that we have deadlines and milestones for, and almost all of that communication is done through emails and maybe a phone call if we need to. But in general, a lot of our clients, we also just kind of have monthly work that we do and there isn't really any communication other than we let them know that it was accomplished. So, I mean, it's not really. I would say we only had one client that even though it had been explained it was a little difficult as far as opposite time zones.

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I guess if you manage it.

Yeah. So that brings me to the next question with what you do is it sounds like it's a combination of sort of, you know, one off projects, but also some maintenance work for, for people. Is that right?

Absolutely. I mean, we really work on meeting clients where they're at and kind of being as much as they want us to be. So whether that's for I need a landing page or a website designed and I'll take it from there. Especially clients that, you know, are more tech savvy and, you know, they just need it designed.

Sure.

Professionally. And then they can kind of take it after we finished to clients that turning on the computer is a little difficult for them and we handle everything for them. Hands off. So they come and say, I need. This is my goal. How do I get there? We'll create sites for them or branding or explainer videos and we'll manage it all for them. And they don't have to think about it. They can concentrate on what, what they specialize in.

Yeah.

Right.

No, okay, that makes sense. Yeah. So it's not a one size fits all thing. You're a, you're kind of adaptable agency in that regard.

We would like to think so.

Of course, you have to draw the line sometimes, right?

Absolutely. And that was my point I was going to make that you really can't be everything to everybody and expect to actually be good and effective at it. So we do have certain services that we specialize in and we focus on those and then we have others that we recommend out to other professionals that we know that do a great job and that's what they focus in. Like, SEO would be a great thing for us to offer as a web agency, but that's not an area that we specialize in and focus our time on. So we let others handle that and refer that out rather than, you know, trying to do everything under the sun for, for a client.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool.

Do you have an SEO agency you like? I always like to put people on.

The spot with that stuff.

We, we have a couple that, that I know pretty well and, and one that I believe we're probably going to be hiring for ourselves. So I guess that's the ultimate recommendation if we use them ourselves. So, so yeah, there's, there's definitely a lot of partners you come in contact just running your business. That's good. I mean, I get like 30 SEO emails a day. Of course, websites, of course, register a domain and I've got 10 emails today of people saying, oh, I see you registered this domain. Do you want a website created? Well, that's what I do. So pro.

Probably not, but that's awesome. So let's talk about the name, the impetus and how you guys came up with. I think the name's really cool, Jumpanzee. It's, you know, kind of stands out. What. Tell us how you got started with that.

I wish I had an awesome story. So I will tell you what we, what we'd like to say. The story is. That's perfect.

You're Brandon, you're telling a story.

Chimpanzees were the first mammals to use tools for the advancement of their species. And we provide business owners with the tools to grow their business and to jumpstart their business. So Jumpan Z. But in reality, when we came back from South Africa, we kind of wanted to jumpstart the business. And so we actually acquired like a three month old company called Jumpan Z that had maybe served like three or four clients. They had some branding and the website and we were like, well, we can spend our time redoing everything while serving clients and building the company rather than starting from scratch. So we bought that and just kind of took it from there. We like the name. It was unique, creative, but yeah, don't have like a trip out to the desert to come up with names.

Yeah, your Vision Quest.

Yeah, no, Vision Quest, unfortunately.

No. It's cool though. That's good.

How long was Jumpan Z in business before you acquired it?

Three months.

Oh. Oh.

I See, early.

Okay, so it was pretty brand spanking new. So it just had had a couple months of work already accomplished that allowed us to kind of skip forward.

That's an odd time for someone to decide that it's a good time to sell. Is there more to that story that you can tell us?

It was an Australian serial entrepreneur. He liked creating projects and kind of seeing where he could go with them. And then I think he moved on to working for an actual big startup. But it was more of a test project for him to see if he could serve like prosthetize and package some surfaces together for low budget startups necessarily is kind of what he initially targeted. And so people could get a logo, a landing page and an explainer video for very affordably. And so a lot of startups especially like that, they could come get all these services at once.

That's right.

So he proved it worked and then he wanted to move on to something else.

So he was, he was not jumpan Z was not in Florida when you acquired it. It was in Australia, Is that right?

It was in Australia, but I think a majority of the original clients were in the U.S. i got it.

Okay, cool.

That's cool. So, you know, we talked about SEO and you know, getting tons of emails every day. It also, you know, it kind of seems to be or can be a crowded marketplace, you know, for brand and web designers and lots of different services out there pushing that, you know, Fiverr 99 designs, all these kind of st. What do you guys do to stand out in that market or is it not as crowded as I think?

I would say it's definitely crowded, but that means that the demand is there. And so if you can stand out and brand yourself, then you'll have more customers than you can handle. So we really seek to stand out with our customer service. We really make ourselves easy to work with and to really adjust to the client's level of understanding. And so we have certain clients that understanding how websites work and what they need for their business is foreign to them to clients that are incredibly tech savvy and want us to put together full e commerce site with special plugins and everything which we can handle. So we really make ourselves easy to work with in that regard and available. I mean, a lot of our initial clients that came to us, they came because their previous webmaster had gone missing or it take weeks to get any change accomplished for their site or you know, their previous web person held their stuff hostage and they're like, well, I don't, I Don't want that. So mostly we learned initially doing what we say we're going to do on time and being available were huge differentiating, differentiating factors that they wouldn't get elsewhere. And we did have people also come to us from doing services like Fiverr, trying to build their own Squarespace or Google website. And they realized, you know what, this isn't quite as easy as I thought. I may be able to actually build it, but as far as design, I can't make it look like I want it to look like, which this is my business, this is my professional online presence. I need it to reflect that. And so they would come to us and that's what we helped them with. So we also initially experimented with trying to differentiate by price, which quickly learned that is the worst thing. So it's a race to the bottom and you try to be the cheapest out there, you'll go nowhere and you'll be frustrated doing so.

I do like your clients won't be.

Happy regardless, but I do like on your site how you have some clear pricing up front of what to expect and what you get for some kind of off the shelf stuff. And then you take it from there, which I think is great for somebody who's coming in and also can allow them to kind of, you know, dip their toe in a little bit and use you guys for, you know, one, maybe a small thing that could lead to something, you know, much bigger, I think.

Absolutely. We have people that come to us just for logos or they need some graphic design done for like trade show banners or even a car, car wraps or, you know, whatever. And we help them out with that. And a lot of the time it turns into we need a website also or we need an explainer video. And we kind of grow with the clients. So we build that trust by delivering whatever the initial project is and then we go from there.

Makes sense. Yeah, so does it. At what stage does a typical business contact you guys are these early on ones that just, hey, I've got nothing and I need some help or folks that want to revamp things.

What's more typical, I would say all over the entire spectrum from people that are just considering starting a company to establish corporations. And both are great, we can work with both. And we really adapt to meet the clients, where they're at and what their needs are. And we don't just try to, well, what do you need? You need a website. We'll create a website for you. We really have onboarding and discovery calls with them to determine what their needs are and then what they need done to get to that point. And so we really figure out where they're at. If they're just starting, we can help them with their brand creation, figuring out what their company is and where they're going, and getting their initial online presence created to corporations that have been around a while and say, our website was done back in the 90s, we need that completely redone and we need landing pages for all of our digital marketing so that we have better conversion rates. So it just really depends. And both are great. I mean, if you have some history, then you kind of already know what your goals are and when you're going. And that makes it a little easier on us to tell you what you really need versus at the beginning, we get to start fresh and kind of be as creative as we'd like and reflecting their values and what they want their company to be. So, pros and cons of each?

Sure, sure. So, thinking, putting your small business owner hat back on for a minute, what do you think the most important aspect of this type of relationship that your customers typically have with you? So we have a business owner that's going out to contact someone to do these, you know, branding, logo design or, you know, explainer videos, website development, graphic design, that kind of thing. What is the, the most important aspect of that relationship that you, you would tell a small business owner to look out for? You know, what do they really have to, to do to make it a successful relationship?

I would think you would need, you need to know what you're actually trying to accomplish because if you don't know what you're aiming at, you're always going to miss it and it's going to be frustrating experience for both the client and for us to try and figure out what that is and the best way to meet that. So you really do need to know what you want accomplished. I mean, we can provide you a million different tools, but unless you know what you want, then it doesn't really matter that we can offer all that because you don't know where you want to be.

Yeah. And do you like, you know, sit down with those? I mean, I've gone, I've. You're talking to someone that's done this, you know, dozens of times. And from all different, you know, revamping it to starting it, to doing everything, to me, it always seems to be how you communicate with. And I think you, you know, tapped into that where, you know, what do you really want to, to get done here? And, and oftentimes it's, it's, it's really important, critically important to sit down and hash that out right when you're getting started with your, you know, your solution provider like you guys.

Absolutely. I mean we always have a discovery call or meeting if we can meet in person with clients to hash that out and figure out what they're trying to accomplish so that we can meet that. And that's really important. Sometimes they don't know and that's the value of the meeting is that we can figure it out and they can think through that to determine this. This is my goal. I, you know, everybody wants more customers, but how are we going about that? What's most effective? Who are your customer? Where do they hang out? Where's the best marketing to them? You know, copy the content on your site can vary wildly depending on who you're marketing it to. So all of that gets, gets put into effect once, once we know what their goal is.

Yeah, that's great, that's cool. Go ahead, Dave.

No, no, no, I'm just nodding in agreement. This is fantastic.

Yeah, yeah, it's good. So you know, looking back and you know, we asked this, this question of just about every guest that, that come on because, well, primarily because I've made so many mistakes and I'm sure Dave hasn't but you know, we all learn from, you know, so much from you know, our, our screw ups, if you will and, and they help us, you know, move on. What do you think is the, and I always call it the best mistake that you've made with Jump nz, You know, something that taught you the most about the business.

It's not necessarily a single story, but one of the kind of mistakes that we kind of learned a lot from was adding a live chat to our site. We were so excited that it was the coolest thing ever and we added it to our site. We use talk to for our site and it was incredible. But we were the ones who were answering and chatting with everybody and people wanted to reach out all the time. I'd be taking chats at like 11 o' clock at night while eating dinner and trying to watch tv. And I'd get four people pop on and two in Germany and wherever. And I thought it was really fun at first but quickly realized it could be incredibly time consuming and that you know, it really required our time to have those chats with people. I mean it was helpful that they were able to ask us questions if they didn't see something on the website that answered what they were looking for or if they had any questions about our services. But it really took a lot of time and that really translates to everything is time's your most valuable resource and you don't want to set yourself up to where that resource is being filled by not necessarily your ideal tasks or the critical task for your business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Especially if they're not converting to actual customers and you know that the chat thing can, can really do it to you.

Which, which we did. We do have, you know, them convert customers and it works out great that I can have those chats and they, and they, especially if they think it's a real person, which it is. But I get a lot of them saying are you a bot? Prove to me bot. And I'll, I'll answer their thing. And they're like no, I still think you're a robot. And so that's always interesting to try to. How do you prove you're not a robot?

Yeah, that is interesting. That's crazy. Well that's, that's cool. That's unique. We haven't heard that one before and I would like that. I would agree with you that man, those things that sound, oh, this will be great and will you know sometimes that you can be kind of too available and don't have any kind of parameters on it that can be tough to manage. So what do you think is your biggest obstacle to your successes and what's your plan to overcome it?

Scaling is definitely our biggest obstacle and the one that we're currently working on and have been working on. Like I said, time is biggest resource and when your time is filled up with the day to day task, you don't really get to work on your business and, and expanding it and growing it. We're lucky enough to have some great team members that help us with project work and that we can utilize on our graphic design and development and video and everything. But ultimately, you know, our, our time is still getting filled with a lot of the day to day work as well and overseeing those projects. So one of the biggest steps forward is we're really working on scaling the video portion of our business with explainer videos. We're working on a new product site and digital marketing and everything for that to really expand that portion because that's very systematized. We got the process down. We got a team that is amazing at producing the videos and filling them and that we can handle a lot more in that area of our business where the website portions aren't as easily scalable because every project's unique. Everybody has different goals. Every website's not the same. And, you know, we strive that we're not creating websites that are the same. We. Yeah, it's not all cookie cutter stuff. Yeah, that's right. We don't really do the cookie cutter stuff. So it's not as easy to, you know, get points abc from client and throw them into something and be done. So as we scale the video, we'll come back to the web portion and really work on process, like systematizing the processes and the product offerings with that to where it is a little more scalable and doesn't take as much time from my wife and I. Yeah, so that's cool.

So, real quick, I love the concept of the explainer videos, but for folks listening that may not know what that is, tell us quickly what it is and if you think, you know, does every business lend itself to having something like that up on their site?

Absolutely. Explainer videos are short, animated videos that explain what your product or service is. You can also use them to teach and explain processes and everything. But mostly they're used to explain what your product or service is. And so they're fun, they're entertaining, they're short, and they really capture people's attention and clearly and effectively deliver the information and the value points that you want to get across to your customers. The average, each person has an attention span less than a goldfish now of 8 seconds. So have a very limited time to get across to your customers what you want to tell them. If they see a bunch of words or even images they kind of gloss over. They're not going to read everything. You're not going to get the points across to them, they're going to leave. And the videos really get that point across and engage them. I mean, I find myself even on Facebook scrolling through and watching videos without the sound and trying to figure out what's going on because I'm too lazy to click and actually listen to the sound. And, you know, it's just like, oh, well, I'm kind of invested in this video now, even though I'm halfway through and I don't even know what it's about. And so videos really capture people's interest and they pay attention to them.

And do you think it's, you know, most businesses, you know, it's applicable to where they could benefit from having something like that up on their website?

Yeah, I don't know if necessarily always on their website is the best place for them. I mean, they're pretty versatile. Whether it's email marketing websites on a landing page, Facebook, social, you know, digital ads. They can be used in a lot of different places. And it really depends on what your goal is. The previous company I worked for, the big engineering construction company, like 10,000 employees, they used explainer videos for their yearly ethics training. I mean, it was this yearly training. It was not the most interesting thing. And you have to get 10,000 people in the, in the company to do it every year. And so what they did is they created these long explainer videos that went through all the points. They had, you know, quiz questions after every so long. But it was probably one of the most fun trainings I ever did. And it's an ethics training, so that's cool. You can, you can use them that way. Or we have clients, you know, we'll combine them with landing pages. And landing pages with video are 800% or convert 800% better than pages without videos. So when it comes to spending money on ads and driving people those pages, that's. That's a, That's a big difference. So.

Yeah, makes sense. That's great. Well, it's cool. And I've, I've learned a lot of good stuff here today. And so what's the best way for our listeners to learn more about jumpanzee and connect with you guys?

Our website and blog are definitely a great spot to learn more and connect with us. We kind of are, in the case of the cobbler's children and has not been updated itself in quite a while. So that's on our goals. The whole working on our business, not in our business. So the whole scaling thing. So we will be revamping that in the next month or 2. Our YouTube and Vimeo, if they want to watch some of the explainer videos and kind of see what those are like and be entertained a little bit. The live chat, although I would prefer an email, is probably best. So just. Davidjumpanzee.com is my email, if anybody wants to reach out.

Awesome. We'll have it linked up at BusinessShow Co as well. And, David, we. Thanks for, you know, thanks for hanging out with us today. It's a great story and we wish you well and, you know, in your travels and in your business.

Yeah, man, it's a. I know it's a lot of work, but you're really taking advantage of something. You know, we always say being in business for yourself, you trade all of your freedom for a ton of flexibility. So there you go.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, of course. All right, folks. You can find us businessshow Co. And if you want to join our small business support group, BusinessShow Co, Facebook will bring you right there. Whatever you can do to keep living the charmed life David's got the charmed life.

You can.

Sounds like it to me.

Yeah, man.

Have a good one.

See you next week.

Take care.