Building High-Performance Websites for Profitability | Matt Dorman

Hey creative, are you ready to discuss profits, the money, the ways to make it happen? The Profitable Creative Podcast is for you, the creative, how you define it. Videographers, photographers, entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, you get it. CEO of Core Group and author Christian Brim interviews industry experts, creative entrepreneurs, and professionals alike who strive to be creative and make money at the same time. Sound like you? Tune in now. It's time for profit.

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Yukon, Oklahoma, home of the Fightin' Millers. Lovely town, grown enormously since I've been around. So Thank you for listening. Joining the show today, Matt Dorman of Endeavor. Matt, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Christian. And to the one follower.

And yes, one listener. It's fascinating. You know, do you have a podcast?

We do. Even smaller than one.

But yeah, well, it's, it's a, it's, I've learned a lot. I've been doing this a little over a year and it's, it's just First of all, like, and if anybody's interested, they should go to PodMatch because they have a lot of public data that they track on independent podcasts. But if you have in the first 7 days more than 27 people download your podcast, you're in the top 50% worldwide.

Oh yeah.

Which just speaks to the fact that Most podcasts don't survive. I mean, like, that statistic's like 90% never get to 100 episodes. And just how niche the industry has gone. But Alex Sanfilippo, the founder of PodMatch, has estimated that one listener has more economic value than 100 impressions of a social media post because of the engagement, right?

Yeah, right. That makes sense.

So it's been fascinating. So there's lots of, lots of places all over the world where there's one person that has listened to the show, and it's fascinating. But we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you. Tell us about Endeavor.

Yeah, we're a technology services company. Really what we focus on is high-performance websites. Typically most of them are driving some kind of profit, some kind of margin, whether they're selling goods or in the advertising space like content sites.

Yeah, so my experience is most people in the website business are more on the creative side, the design elements, not the architecture of it, but the architecture Especially for certain industries, like you mentioned, like if you have an online retailer or anywhere, well, I'll let you answer that question. Like who is it most important to, to have good technical websites as opposed to pretty websites?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I would say all, but that's not really true. I mean, there's a lot of good platforms out there that you work with a purely creative type person or yourself and create you know, your website, right? And even if you're selling goods, um, Wix, Squarespace, like there's, there's plenty of them. Shopify on the commerce side is a good platform that you can grow from. The difference would be when you start hitting numbers that are million, a million plus or more, because the, the finite things that you can do affect real dollars. Like you might be affecting, you tens of dollars by doing these things on a small site, but you're affecting tens of thousands of dollars as you continue to grow up. And those are not like, oh, make it look different. Those are look different for the right person and really customized by the person that's coming to the site, knowing a little bit more knowledge about the person.

Okay, so I have a client and colleague who has an agency and he was one of those rare people that could do both technical and design. And he's since scaled back and only has two niches, one of which is very surprising. It's like, I want to say enough to be meaningful without disclosing too much. It's basically a retailer of machinery in a, like a dealership. Dealership network. So think car dealership, but not cars. And really, you know, he had great success doing it with one, and all of his growth is these other dealers from around the country saying, hey, I want you to do for me what you did for them. And I'm not sure what he does. But maybe you could shed some insight onto something like that type of business where what you do would be helpful.

Yeah. I mean, there are, there are a lot of companies, not a lot. There are, there are companies out there, like him or her, like ourselves that by niching down into an industry, you're building out a platform that's very specific to the things that they're doing. We don't do this, but there's companies that service law firms. Like we have some law firm companies, but they're more like— they're doing different marketing things that are— they're not typical. But there's some that do, like, they're very basic, like they have a landing page, lawyer information, and a portal for their clients to log in and all the legal stuff. So they handle all that IT stuff. Um, you know, we're primarily on the marketing side of all the things that we do. So we, we work— we've, we've not struggled. We've do gone through like, oh, we will do anything to everyone. Um, we're starting out, we're now 10 years old, we're, we're niching down more and more. My partner handles, um, what we're calling active lifestyle, so like mountain bike companies or roller skating or snowboarding companies, like really trying to focus on that area because it's our interest and B, we've kind of developed a certain thing around it. And then myself, I like outdoor off-roading and things like that. So I'm trying to focus more on those types of companies going forward. In the past, we dealt with, like I said, all kinds of things, a lot of media and publishing, news websites that help us in these industries because they need to publish content really fast, really well. And that's, you know, we've built tools for a lot of years for those types of companies.

I'm going to throw this comment out there. I did not make it, but I want your response. I was actually on LinkedIn and it was one of my CPA colleagues. And, um, they were saying that, uh, the reason why some— not all, but some— accountants have really bad websites, um, is because they're investing their time in building relationships, you know, the, the old school marketing, if you will. And to me, it felt like a little bit of an excuse, um, but there it, it produced this interesting discussion about in the, in our industry, the importance of even having a website and what its purpose is. So like, if you, if you go back up 30,000 feet and you look at all of the technology changes that have happened in the last 5 years, what, what is, why does a business need a website?

Sure. Well, I think people will invest the time in, in a business owner will invest the time in the things that they've realize that they've had traction on, right? So, you know, if you're doing networking events and you're doing, you know, local things and you're getting lots of local businesses, then your website can be pretty basic, um, because they need to look up your address. Um, but if you're outside of a local market, right, for a long time you need to have a website for SEO. SEO was the thing. People would Google it and they're going to find you, um, or they're going to look up a review on somewhere. And if you didn't have a website from there, no one could find you. Now, as in last 6, 9 months, people are going to an LLM, ChatGPT, something like that, and asking it a question. And if you're not showing up in those results, then you're missing out on a new generation. And that— it's a multi-generation at this point. Like, it's not just young people. And you have to have a website in order to get into those. Like, there's no skip or space that you can't have, you know, a digital footprint in order to get into those answers. So it's still kind of on the SEO space of like, well, I need something, so— but then it's a little bit more advanced because now I need content that the people are asking for. Um, so it's a little bit more advanced than what it was even with SEO. And SEO, you'd have people that can create content for you and you rank well. Um, we're get— I think we're seeing the like we're not a company that does that, but it's— I see companies out there that are building newer types of content just for the LLM models, um, for the, for the questions that people are asking.

Yeah, and I, I've run into this discussion with people that have done SEO and done content for us in the past, and it's like, are you writing for the robots or are you writing for the people? Because they don't look the same, but I don't know how LLMs change that other than what I've been told is, you know, it's really leaning into the question space. So like, what would you have on an FAQ? You know, blow that up by 100 and that's what you're shooting for.

Yeah, I mean, a simplistic way of doing it would be to have, look at every post, every page that you have on it. Think of all the questions. And the cheating way of doing it, you throw it into ChatGPT, say, what questions do you have about this page? And then put those questions and answers onto it. Um, I think that's what a lot of companies are doing, um, essentially.

Well, and, and I, you know, I would push back against my colleague that made that comment that, you know, even if you are doing local networking, right, and you don't care if anybody else ever hears about you, You're going to tell me that you meet somebody and they're not going to go back and look you up on the internet. Like, I don't buy that. And, you know, what are you doing to support whatever you're telling them in person? Like, are you— where you have more than the 5 or 15 minutes or hour-long lunch that you can go into depth and really, you know, lay out more of your story, more of your client stories, more of what problems you solve. Like you, you have unlimited time with, with a website and why not? I don't get it.

Yeah. And it's always there whenever someone's going to have the need to look you up. They're not going to look you up 9 to 5 when you're available to answer the phone. Yeah. It's after work or before work or on the weekend.

I want to pivot back to what you said where you started out with, you know, trying to be all things to all people, and you've been doing this for 10 years, and, uh, kudos for you figuring it out that quickly. It took me a little longer to figure that out. Um, what have, what have been some of the struggles you've had with, you know, making that decision on like what niches to pursue or like, you know, what work you don't take. Like, yeah, kind of talk about that.

Um, so I, one of the reasons I like your podcast so much because you do talk about profit quite a bit. Like, in my mind, for us, for a company, for especially for an agency or someone like us, like, profit is the only reason we're around. Like, so niching or specializing in certain types of clients Um, there's a huge difference in profit margin for, for us between companies that we're— we kind of know about, they need a website, but we're gonna have to do a lot of background work and like redoing and things like that. And our dev team may or may not know how to work with their types of, you know, their content or just the creation of content, right? So we spent a— we burn a lot of time. A lot of our, our projects are fixed price, or we also fixed price like the amount of work we're going to do in a month, and we're not going to charge them for overages that cause internally because we have to learn something. So, you know, learn fast. I mean, 10 years isn't super fast, and I've also been in the industry for 30 years, so, okay, it's, it's taken me a while to figure some of this stuff out. Um, luckily even bad profit margins are still profit margins, right? So you learn from bad things, lose some money sometimes, the next one you make a little bit of money, and it'll average out. But once you get into a smaller niche like us, uh, not that we're making great profit margins, but we're able to invest more and then grow more, is a bigger thing, way to look at it. Because yes, if we didn't want to, like, if we just wanted to take all the money, then we would do that for a while and die out anyways. But by investing more into the current clients and into like new things that they're trying to do, we have that extra money to do that in time.

Yeah, you know, if, if I were, if I were to describe, you know, whatever to you, like, okay, you're gonna go out and today you're gonna play baseball, and next week we're gonna go play football, and then next, next month we're gonna switch to basketball, uh, and then we're gonna go to soccer and highline and lacrosse and paddle, like, you know, pick any sport, whatever, it doesn't matter, you go on and on and on. And your point is, would you ever be really good at any of them? Yeah. No, right? And so a lot of businesses, especially when they start out, get caught in that cycle of take anything so you can pay the bills, but it becomes a hamster wheel because you're not making any money on it because you're having to reinvent the wheel and you're having to relearn. And I love the idea of being as— the way I describe it to my team is you want to be so specific in your niche that you can grow at whatever rate you want to grow. We've set the target at 10% and no larger. Right? Like, get it down to as small as you can and still have an acceptable growth rate within that group that you're where you want to be. And don't go any larger than that. Don't go expand, you know, like, because we've even talked about like, okay, well, we've got these verticals that we market to. It's like, should we just pick one? Like, is one enough? Is agencies enough? Is videographers enough? You know, like, and it's hard when you're not real sure, I think, in the problem that you're solving for the customer, right? Because as you said, like that, what you described was the exact thing. Like you've got to figure out what it is that they need fixed and then fix it. And it's going to be different. Might be 20% different, it might be 50% different, but it's going to be different for every company. And you want to, you want to get that difference to 20%, not working on 80% or 100%.

Yeah, yeah, for a lot of reasons. I mean, the mark— the margin is one thing, but just the, the speed, um, because it's the faster I can fix a problem is it's great for the client. Yes, I don't make as much money, like it's not hourly as billable, but like I can get to their next problem because they're not going to have one problem, right? I mean, especially with websites, um, we, we don't, we don't build a lot of websites from scratch unfortunately. We, you know, we're not a design agency, so we take a lot of problems on, a lot of problem websites on. Um, so there's typically quite a few things that we get to address. Over the course of like a month or two, the initial engagement.

So how do you, or do you, interact with other elements of marketing? So like if they have an agency or someone that's managing their paid ads, how do you interact or interface with those elements?

Yeah, it depends on the company, on the partner company that we're working with. I mean, some of them have, like, they'll have a development team. So we'll either be working with their development team because it's such a big project, they can't do it well at the scale. Or it's in a, you know, we specialize in a few. For a long time, we were doing WordPress only, open source only, you know, big sites on those platforms. So they would come to us when they didn't have the skill set internally. Um, it's pretty ubiquitous, pretty widespread. They can pick up PHP WordPress developers pretty easily now. So if they're dealing with large content, like assets, we're a good fit because they're typically— if they're building up, you know, 5-page marketing sites, right, but then they have this client that wants to do all kinds of content marketing, well, their team may not know how to build out a toolset like that. So sometimes we're partnering with their team, sometimes they're doing so much offshore that they've been burned too many times and then they decide to come onshore, um, I guess. Um, or, or it's our client and yes, we don't, we don't do the content marketing, we don't do design, stuff like that. So they're going to go out and they're going to be for— that agency is going to be quote unquote, I guess, forced to use us because the partner, the client wants to use us for, for for all the implementation.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. You, you mentioned a couple of pricing or, or business model, uh, strategies. So do you typically do, uh, flat fee or hourly, or how is it you normally structure your engagements?

Yeah, we do. Well, not, not a whole lot of hourly anymore. Um, those are Like, we'll do, we'll do hourly for longer-term clients where they'll, they're bringing on something new and we're not really sure about what it is. Typically, we're, we're telling them a price of, of the project, of the, the task, let's say. Um, most of our clients though, they're on longer-term month-to-month. Technically, legally, I guess we, we did, we allow them to leave whenever they want, but they're on for years, um, with us building out you know, they put, put a list of things that they want to get done the next month. We do them within the budget that we've already defined, kind of a retainer-type model, I guess, would be one way of putting it. Um, and then, and then go from there. So it, it's weird because yes, it's technically hourly because we do have a fixed amount of hours, but we go over all the time and don't charge them. Sometimes we'll go under and then be able to push to the next month. Sometimes we'll find new ways of doing things over the last year where we're using AI more to do development, and we end up having to fix our, our kind of estimate model and pricing model because we can do things so much faster sometimes.

So you've been lowering prices?

We've been lower— well, we've been, we've been increasing the, the kind of the velocity, I guess, and being able to do more. Uh, okay, so not really, so not decreasing like the monthly fees. Um, it's kind of been fixed yet, um, because they're, you know, they have budgets that they're already set to pay anyways internally, so they're not gonna— they don't want to actually— most of our clients don't want to adjust month to month. They want actually a fixed amount that they're going to pay for the year. So we just end up doing more work or getting more work done, um, the last— and that's usually on maintenance things where we're a little leery of doing. We've tried to do some things from scratch with the, the vibe coding. That's one thing on our blog post or our, our podcast. We've done some, some actual doing it on live and it's fun until you get to a certain point and then it blows up and it's like, well, where you look at what it did.

Yeah. And, and like, if you don't, I mean, I like your background is as a developer.

Correct? Right.

Yes. Okay. So you're a code monkey. Sorry, that was derisive. I'm just a pencil pusher, so it's fine. The thing about that I've noticed, because I've played with some of these, like Lovable and some others where, you know, it's really cool and it is fascinating. Like, oh, you can do all this from a couple of prompts. But when you get into the details and you start going a little bit left, a little bit right, and you're not getting the outputs that you want, if you don't understand coding, you're screwed. Like, you can't fix it if you don't have— so, like, Lovable specifically, it seems like it's grown with this idea that just anybody can pick it up and put out a web app. Right. Which is technically true, but like the functionality is very shallow if it's a non-coder using it.

Yeah, I've used probably any of the major market ones out there. I've used both in testing and trying to build some things from scratch. It works really well, like I said, and like you said, like initially, the difference is once you get past like 4 or 5 prompts. Um, I, I alluded or kind of aligned it with I'm basically getting a new junior developer every time I ask it to do something, good or bad.

But not the same one.

They, they will overwrite the things the last prompt, right, did in a different way, even though I asked that one to delete things. And I've gone in circles many times. Yeah, around asking one to delete, the next one brings it back in. And it's a prompt, it's a machine. But it feels like a different person each time.

That's a great example. I've had some of those experiences with GPT and like giving it Excel files, data files, and saying, okay, you know, extract this and give it to me. And it is, it's like it forgets what, like, it's like, wait a second, we had this conversation.

Yeah. Or The, the amount of times I see, you're absolutely— like, I tell it, you didn't do what I asked, you're absolutely right, I'm sorry, let me try again, or give me one more chance. I've had it. I get a little irate with, with my, my prompts sometimes after a few, and it gets very apologetic.

And I— well, yeah, I mean, I, I was working one, I— what I was working on, on GPT, I could not I could get it to work myself, but as soon as I turned it over to somebody else in our team, they would not get the same results, right? Yeah. Because of whatever's going on in the black box of the LLM, they were not getting the same responses. So, okay, screw this. I'm going to go over to Zapier. And I, because I had more control over the steps and what I was doing and the agent itself, was not doing as much, right? But even then, just trying to get it into a standard, like I gave it a template email to use. I'm like, use this. And I had to go through a dozen times before I got it to stick. It was like, you're right. That's not what it's, it says explicitly do this, but I'm sorry, it didn't do that. I'm like, what the hell?

Like, yeah. Yeah. And you'll understand why. So our podcast is called Boozy Browsing. So we're typically drinking while we're doing this and yelling at it. And it's not a lot of drinks, but it doesn't take a whole lot when you have someone or something responding in that way of like, I just told you this and now you're doing the exact opposite and apologizing for it instead of just doing it. Okay.

We've wandered off the dev path. Let's come back to, the, the, the agency model and the, the billing.

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So have you noticed an increase in your margins and your profit since you niched?

Um, well, not in like net because we're now spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising.

Fair enough.

But to grow into that industry.

Yeah.

But the gross, like top line, like we're, it is definitely more efficient internally.

So your gross margin, I'll define it for the audience and you can pretend you already knew. The gross margin is the revenue less those direct costs. So in your case, it'd probably be software costs and dev costs, you know, right? So that remainder, that margin, that has increased since you niched?

Yes, somewhat. I mean, it's noticeable because similar to what we were saying, like it is easier to do the same thing over and over for the most part. I mean, it's not the exact same thing, but there's, we can now templatize and like we're looking for the right things and we've developed a toolset to do it. So we're saving money there. But like I said, we're spending more currently, we're spending more money on not just advertising and marketing, but also it is internal training. So like we, we, we put it in a different area while it is kind of tied to like internal, like it is a cost that we have, but yes, it's kind of an operational cost.

So yeah, growth, uh, growth. So, you know, I, I, uh, been revisiting a book called Predictable Success. I don't know if you've read it, but the whole model of a business is, you know, there's— it's hard when you start up, it's fun when it's growing, then you start hitting some turbulence, and then you plateau, right? And The reality is that growing consistently, profitably is hard work. It's not, it's not easy. And in a lot of ways it's harder than when you start the business. And so a lot of people get to the point that you're describing and they're like, I just am tired. Like this is, I, it's too much work. Um, have you reached that point yet where you're like, yeah, multiple times?

Well, not multiple, like, like not a lot, a lot, but like 3 times at least. And this year is, I mean, honestly, this year is one of those, like, that's one reason why we're not, you know, our margins are not great. We're investing all kinds of money into trying to get new business and there's just. It's a bad year for agencies in general, I think, and the ones I talk to, um, some are going to go under, some are just— they have, like us, we, we've had enough money put away for things like this and we're ready to, to invest in more. But unless things turn around soon, like, we're not really sure. I mean, that's a, that's just an honest thing. We've, we've had other cycles of, of this, but they've been less macro affecting us and more just we had internal turmoil. We, you know, we weren't doing things right.

So what do you think the macro factors are that are impacting you that's different this time?

Uh, I mean, I think, I mean, I'm not a political, I am a political, but I'm like, you know, the tariffs and things like that that affected big businesses trickled all the way down to all kinds of businesses. Processes, right? Um, it's, it's whether the actual numbers affect them. The unknown is what affects the people we work with. Like, they don't know what to do, so they're not going to do anything. Um, so status quo, keeping your websites the way they are, broken or not, wait until, um, you know, something changes. Um, that's, that's one area I think. Yeah, some people started to write about it now, but in technology with the, the tax changes that just came back finally so we could expense our expenses. Like, as a company, as an IT company, that we— the first year we were only able to expense, I think it was like 20% of our expenses, right? Um, so we had a massive profit tax-wise, um, for 2 years. Like, we paid more in taxes than we made as owners. Yeah, all of a sudden, and now we're going to get it back because, you know, we're supposed to get it back over 5 years, but now we're going to get it back quicker because that's a, I don't think a lot of people even understand that, like on the Twitter and like the big tech companies, like that's probably trillions of dollars that they couldn't spend on people. Um, cause they had to give it to the government for a couple of years and wait and let, let it come back to them over the course of years.

Yeah. And, and it, it's, you know, that bonus depreciation has been around long enough where most business owners have it baked into the pie, right? They don't, they don't remember when it wasn't that way. And like most things that come out of Washington, uh, when, when you give somebody something, uh, that they get to receive a benefit from it and they try to take it back there's all kinds of, you know, wailing and gnashing of teeth. And, you know, the idea that you could write off everything you bought unlimited, sitting from my seat, I'm like, that's nuts. Like that, I mean, that's never been that way. I understand the benefit and I sure enjoyed it myself, but like that's expensive. An expensive way for government to do taxation, right? To the government, not, not to us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But going back to the unpredictable— unpredictability, yeah, there's a lot of unpredictability out there. Um, I kind of— I, I also, I'll say this as an opinion and get your opinion. I've talked about on the show, uh, the crackhead energy in the marketing space. And it's this, it started with, I went to a mastermind of agency owners earlier this year and there were about 20 there. And I'd had agency clients for decades, but I'd never really got into that setting with them where I was a fly on the wall and they were just talking about their businesses. And comparing. The thing that struck out, stuck out to me like a sore thumb was their retention. And this group was patting themselves on the back because their retention was up to what essentially equated to 50% a year. Like, you know, they were churning clients where they were keeping them for 2 years.

Right.

And I'm sitting back here going, and our retention has hovered in the high 80s, low 90s for, for decades. And I'm like, wow, like, I can't imagine the pressure to have to go out and replace that many clients every month, right? That sounds awful. It also raised the question of, are you guys actually solving any problems for anybody? Because if you were solving the problem, Why would I leave, right? And I'm not gonna, I, if you look back at how I hired agencies, I lasted longer than 2 years on average, but I can see where people, you know, buy the quick fix, right? That's where the crackhead comes in. They buy the quick fix. And then when they're not getting the high anymore, they go find another dealer. And it's, it's this selling people what they want, uh, rather than what they need. And I understand very clearly that, that sometimes you can't sell them what they need because they don't perceive it, that they, they don't want it. Like, I, I don't think I need someone to technologically fix my website, right? So I think you do have some headwinds in the industry, that and with, with the technology changes, there has never been more noise ever. Like, and trying to market in that as a business owner, it's really challenging because how do you cut through the noise? I mean, it's, it's hard.

Yeah. Yeah. When everyone can create volumes and volumes of content and like, we do things great. Um, it is, it is definitely harder.

So what, what types of things are you trying to do on a marketing level that, that have been effective?

So we, we got away from— and this is because we got so— it's my, my business partner and I are 50/50 owners, and we, we run the team. We're both technical. We, we started out the company doing lots of webinars, in-person events, speaking, you know, knowledge sharing type things. And we grew, I think we grew quite a bit. And then we got really busy and really involved in just running the, like, doing the business, I guess, versus running the business. And so we're getting back into like this age of podcasts, but also webinars, also online events, speaking events, in-person speaking events, in-person networking events. Like getting, I guess, getting back to basics. And I've seen a lot of people actually writing about this around the, you know, that's the one thing AI can't do. They can't get the face-to-face handshake and like even this, like they can't replicate that. Um, and I think that's, you know, we need to, it's a long game. Like we can meet someone.

Any good marketer will tell you, every marketer tells you it's just going to take time.

Yeah. I, I know that this takes time, so I'm good with it. But it could be 3 years, um, where that person would come back. It could be also 3 days. So yes, like they could have a problem right then, your conversation with them changes everything. But yeah, I think that's, that's the thing that we're trying to get back into, and we've been doing it all year. Um, I think it could play out, you know, it's now fall, um, fall being, you know, September, everyone's back in school, the kids are back in school. Business typically turns around this time of the year. The more we get closer to the end of the year, it's more likely to turn around. So I'm cautiously optimistic that all the things we've been doing are right. If all the things we've been doing are wrong, we're not going to know until the end of the year, I guess.

Yeah. And I would add to that that I very much agree with your statement, like going back to basics. Um, marketing, I think, I think in the advent of the internet, so the last 25 years, there was a lot of movement away from the foundations of marketing, right? Yeah. You know, like identifying your ideal customer, like how many business owners are running around out there without having an ideal client profile, like they don't know who they're looking for. And then, because they don't know who they're looking for, they have no idea what the messaging should be, what you should be talking about, and you don't know where they're congregating to even hear the message, the channel. So, you know, just going back to those basics, I think, is not only more effective but prudent because You can waste a lot of money, um, on crack. I mean, it's, it's easy.

It's easy. I bet.

Um, I want to pivot back one more time to, uh, the, the model, the billing model, and I, I'll share a conversation I had with my attorney who is a friend since, uh, grade school. Um, And he's in the professional services business like I am, and he's roughly the same size. And we're both roughly at that— we're both roughly struggling to get past this plateau of taking it to the next level. And I'm one of his clients. And when I signed up, and maybe this will give you some insight or you can give me some insight. When I signed up, I thought it was a fee for service, like, okay, I'm going to pay you $1,000 a month and you're going to take care of these things for me, right? And he had a list like, this is by month what we're going to do. And over the time realized that it really was a retainer model, right? And so if we get down to that list and this month it says we're supposed to review your corporate bylaws or your lease agreement, or whatever, and I don't have that need, well, then there wasn't anything for them to do, right? And so they'd go down to the next month and until they found something that I needed, right?

Yep.

But the problem arose then when I went over budget on a month because there were some differences and some technical challenges with something that I was working on. And I'm like, well, but you didn't give me credit for the time that you didn't really need to work 2 months ago because I didn't need that thing done, right? But it all came back to his mentality and their company's mentality of, I've got to have X number of billable hours. That's his, you know, he's like, I need 6 hours a day from each of my attorneys. And I don't care what they do other than that, right? But that's their whole mantra. Give me 6 hours every day. But there's something fundamentally flawed in my mind about that model because I don't really give a shit how long it takes you to do anything. I'm buying the outcome. For instance, I need these documents reviewed on a regular basis to make sure that we're not, you know, setting ourselves up for trouble, right? I'm buying an outcome. And I don't care how much it takes you, how much time it takes you. I don't care who you have do it, whether you have somebody offshore or you have an AI. I don't care as long as the output is reached at the agreed amount. Right. So hearing my rant, I actually called him a communist, which he's not. But, you know, in any case, how, how do you respond to that? What do you— what does that What does that raise for you?

Yeah, I think, I mean, we, we've toyed with that model. I mean, on the books we do more of that model where yes, you're paying a certain amount a month, we expect this amount, next month is a new month. The reality is we don't do that, and that's mainly because we're, we're expecting and hoping that they're going to be along the ride for years. We're not the 50%, we're the 85, 95% kind of retention. So yes, we're expecting them— they're going to be around for a long time, and, and we're going to have low months and high months, um, with an individual client, and, and we're going to work through that. Um, and it's— I, I don't know how to put a— I don't know how to put that into like a legal document, right, or a statement of work that says, yeah, don't worry about it. I tell people like, yes, we're going to move things. Like, we'll— if you want us to keep track of the hours and we'll push it, then, then fine. If you're— but if you're going to ask me to do that, then I will be more strict about it. Like, we'll do it for 3 months and then they're going to go away, right? If you're going to ask me to keep track of it. But if we're just in a rela— like a business relationship and we're good, then yeah, every time you ask me, I'm not— we're just going to do it. And if it hurts after a while, then I'm gonna— well, we have to figure this out for next, you know, next quarter or next year, um, the next time we renew. Um, that's how we handle things. So more around a renewal of, well, last year you asked for a lot, but I think we got— like, it's typically that we had to get through something. Um, you know, some type— something went wrong, something was already wrong when they came on, we knew it. And then this year is already— like, we can already see what this year is going to look like, so we're not going to ask them to increase, but it's a conversation that we have, you know, individually. We have myself and my partner as account managers, so they're talking with an owner. They're not talking with someone that's dependent on the hours being a certain amount. I mean, technically we are, but it's, you know, we're more in— we're more cautious of them sticking around than us hitting internal numbers or anything for now.

Yeah, and, and like accountants, for, for decades I track time. Time, right? I tell my colleagues that we don't have any method to track any time. I have no idea how much my people work and their eyes drop to the floor. Like, now the only reason that we can do that is we have a very, very specific scope of service, right? Like, this is what we do. And if you want something outside of that, we probably are not going to do it, we'll help you find somebody that does do it. But if it is something that we can do and we want to do, we're going to— it's going to be outside the scope and it's going to be a separate price. And that's the only way that we can do that that way, um, where you've got so many different variables and so many custom things, it would, it would not be possible to do that.

Not completely. For sure. Yeah, we track— I mean, I'm tracking the hour that I'm on this is an internal tracking, but like we track every hour of every day that we do. And that's not to keep accountability, is because like, well, it is, I guess, but it's a financial thing of we now know like what things, inputs and outputs of everything, and what levers we can pull. Because it's, it, for us, it, it averages out. Like if, if one client is really needy, is what, like not like demanding, but need— they need actual work, right? Most likely other clients are not going to be, so why not kind of move our resources to that? Or me or my partner, we can jump in and work a little later one day. Um, that's, that's not a sustainable model forever, but it is one until we get our— like, we, we're, we're tracking it so we know that this is happening type of thing. So then we change next year.

And, and that, yes, and that's not to say that if we have a, a more complicated client or more complicated relationship, like they're just more needy, like they, they, they want to get on the phone more often. That's not to say we're not going to, we're not going to charge them more because we are. Yeah. But the, the, the thing where we ran into a problem and still kind of do is like capacity. So it's like, okay, well, how many, how many more clients can we add? Because we don't really know how much, you know, we know how this bookkeeper, this bookkeeper has this number of clients, but we don't know how much they can handle more or less other than what they say. And the reality is, you know, for us, it really is more about what that employee wants. Like if they're doing what we need and they don't want to take anymore because we're growing, well, then I just have to go find somebody else to add to the team. Like, I'm not going to sit there and say, well, you've got to take more clients and you've got to work more. Like, I'm not, that's not part of our culture. So, but, you know, that's not to say, like, if you're just coming in and you're only getting the minimum amount of stuff done, that we're not, we're not going to have, you know, it isn't about accountability. For us, but accountants really, they struggle with that. And lawyers and engineers, they want to measure things. And I'm not saying don't measure them. I'm just saying, how is it? How does it potentially affect how you do business? That's, that's all I'm saying. Matt, how do people find out more about Endeavor if they want to work with you?

Yeah, I mean, the best place is to go into Endeavor.io. Endeavor.io, that's our website. Um, is that the French spelling? LinkedIn? What's that?

Is that the French spelling?

I don't know what language that would be. We dropped a lot of vowels. Um, made us, you know, I actually did a blog post finally about this, about our misspellings of our name. Um, part of it was a domain thing when we first registered, of course, some a play on words, and Dev— er, we're development team. Yeah, we're based out of, out of Denver, Colorado. I love it. So lots of fun with that. But yeah, LinkedIn would be the next place. Myself and my partner are very visible. Um, you know, if you looked up Matt Dorman, you're gonna find me most likely.

Well, thank you very much for being on the show and sharing your experience. I appreciate it. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a comment, tell us what you like to hear, and we'll get rid of Matt. Until then, ta-ta for now.